


The Golden Goose

by MilkshakeKate



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Angst, Codependency, F/M, Flirting, Friendship, Identity Porn, Mission Fic, Mutual Pining, Relationship Negotiation, Sexual Tension, Snark, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-27 16:04:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 31,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6290947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilkshakeKate/pseuds/MilkshakeKate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gaby Teller is sick of having her bright ideas swept under the rug. She's saved her boys' skins countless times, and for what? To watch them take the gold? No. Gaby has a better idea: to lure her partners to U.N.C.L.E., to prove her mettle in the field, and to pick apart the infuriating enigma of Illya Kuryakin before he's gone for good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

_Does he ever get tired?_

It’s a question his body only partly answers for her. He sleeps now with his chin tucked down, hat low over his eyes, arms crossed tightly over his chest. He dwarfs the sofa like everything else. _Yes, he sleeps, but does he get exhausted? Does he chase the thought of resting, of lying down and forgetting just for a little while?_

Illya is a man of many switches. Not dials, like Solo — intricate and tricky, ticking, an inclination to only unlock under the right touch — but switches. On, Off, On; always a current running through him, ready for whomever provides the power. There is no in-between. This endless duty leaves no room for an interlude. But of the two states Illya has shown to her, it’s when he’s asleep that he’s closest to whom he _could_ have been, had the KGB never handled him. And handle him they had, moulding him from a boy into the monolith that lies there now, a military unit, on edge even after surrendering to rest. 

Gaby stirs her coffee, still staring. She is careful not to let the spoon scrape the sides.

She has only seen Illya sleep softly once before, after a long day undercover in southern Spain. The white sun and sea air had sanded down all the sharp edges of him, tiring him out like a child, washing away his own breakwaters. He’d fought sleep the whole car journey back to the hotel, an hour of it, over bumpy and dusty orange road, before collapsing on the bed at only five thirty. She’d had to wake him when their dinner arrived. He had been gentle to rise then, grumbling and disorientated, very human — close to what she needed to see, almost unpicked, but it was not enough to figure him out. That would take far more than bodily exhaustion.

“Gaby,” Napoleon murmurs, a cut in the silence. “Make those bright eyes useful and spot for me.”

Then Solo rolls a scope along the sheets, where it glints under the treacherous glow of the street lamps.

Before Illya had retired, fighting, from his shift, they’d pushed the bed to the window for Solo to lie on his stomach. There, he braces on his elbows, stationed for the next few hours with his finger on the trigger and both eyes wide open. _You are the stronger marksman_ , Solo had agreed, mostly to soothe him, _but even the red peril has to rest his baby-blues once in a while_.

Gaby gentles down onto the bed to lie beside him, steadying her coffee and slotting the spotter scope to her brow.

A yellow-black street, cobbled and wet. Absolutely dead empty, save for the endless sleeping bicycles lining the streets below. The canal is high and dappled by the thin sheets of rain. There’s an occasional passerby on the bridge, usually a drunk, only stumbling past the house to steady themselves or piss against a wall and move on. How had Illya stared at this for four hours already, uncomplaining?

Solo is marking two windows in the third floor apartment across the street. Black and wonky with white cornices, as Amsterdam’s canal houses often are, it is unlit and seemingly uninhabited. Still, they lie in wait.

And they share the silence. Solo has already reeled off all he knows about Dutch architecture. The open sash window sprays them whenever the wind changes, wetting the greased rifle and sprinkling Gaby’s hands with a chilly mist. She yearns to be on the Spanish beach again, hot and tan, with Illya pacing barefoot in the sand and Solo seducing at the bar. She fights the closing of her eyes.

“Not long now,” he assures her, a skilled whisper.

They synchronise like this, having spent every hour of every day together; they begin to think in tandem, like siblings or spouses. At least Solo acknowledges it. Illya tends only to stare at her when she seems to think too loudly, the same red spreading over both of their cheeks.

Though it’s impossible he can hear her, isn’t it? _Isn’t it?_ With Illya, she never can tell. His dead silence could be his listening in on her thoughts; an open channel, undisturbed for as long as he stays quiet himself. A bug in her brain, Russian tech. _If he were so astute_ , she thinks bitterly, _he would have touched me by now_.

“Coffee?” she mutters to Solo, waking.

“Please.”

She brings her mug to his lips, his gloved hands still tight on the rifle.

“My god,” he grimaces. “Ever heard of a little sugar?”

“You don’t take sugar.”

“I do with _instant_. God, Gaby, it’s like tar. Worse even. Like it was brewed in a spittoon.”

“You’re exaggerating,” she says, resisting an eye roll. “And spoilt. Concentrate.”

“What time is it?”

“Three twenty, or close enough.” She’d only glanced at Illya’s watch moments ago. “Did you do this for your agency?”

“Sometimes. We had other men in wetwork. I was the one to usher marks into better lighting, let them take the shot.”

“You are still the one,” she reminds him. “You’re on loan.”

“So _that’s_ why you’re so glum.”

“You’re good support, and we work well together. Don’t you think?”

“I suppose,” he says, steadying his grip. She watches his bared fingertips whiten a little, though it could be for the cold.

She’s careful. “When I next meet Waverly, perhaps I can have him draft some new contracts. Permanent ones.”

“You do have a certain power over the old man,” he says. Gaby waits for him. “I thought that was already in the works.”

“Unofficially,” she allows. “I can push things harder.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Solo.”

He doesn’t look up, still piercing across the street, one eye enhanced and the other a little glassy, scanning.

His life with U.N.C.L.E would be richer, in money and in immunity. She knows this, and he knows this. The consideration is a black tape through his head, winding, and she feels it too because again they are synchronised now, magnetised at both ends. Perhaps she’s too hasty in offering him this sliver of hope; five years of a home-grown agent’s expertise is a costly bail, especially from the CIA. She doesn’t know if Waverly has access to that sort of money. But more than hashing out the possibility of the exchange, she wants to hear from Solo’s mouth, not his head, how hard he would work to become her partner.

“I wouldn’t hurry to decline,” he says, finally. It’s a level tone only he could conjure, and it tells her nothing.

“And Illya?”

He does gift her a flicker of a glance then. Imperceptible if she had blinked, but she hadn’t. She’s his spotter, after all.

“You’ll find the KGB are a little less _lenient_ when it comes to sharing,” he murmurs. “Ironically.”

“Well, it is not technically defection.”

“He has more business in Moscow than a steady income. He’s there for his own sake, remember? Family values.”

Gaby burns her glare into the black brickwork across the river, pressing her lips together.

“We’ll handle it when it comes,” he says, softer.

How like him. “I’ll handle it. If I’m awarded coffee duty tonight, I’ll _gladly_ take telephone duty tomorrow. Perhaps if I behave well, I will be promoted to straightening ties.”

“It’s a very noble task,” he says, “Coffee duty.”

It takes every ounce of her training not to swat his arm. Instead, she rolls her gaze back over the street.

“Attic!” she hisses.

The sniper rifle cracks, breaks plate glass, sends a wet cat yowling across the bridge. When she pulls the scope away, Solo is already off the bed and a river of black coffee is scalding her arm.

Gaby grabs her suitcase and makes for the door, flanked soon enough by a wide awake Illya at her back, crowding her closely down the stairs.

In the courtyard she dumps her case in the trunk and slips into the driver’s seat, starts up the car, flicks off the headlights.

Illya ducks into the passenger side. “It is confirmed?”

“We’ll have to find out.”

Solo’s down the fire escape moments later, straight into the back seat with the rifle tucked in its metal case.

Gaby’s out of the courtyard arch and onto the street in seconds.

And then it’s a crawl, and all is quiet, and dark, and slow.

“Well, he’s down,” Solo says finally. “No telling if he’s alone, but it was certainly him.”

Illya nods. “We go to the safe house.”

In her rear view mirror, a shadow flits down the street.

“ _No_ , we’ll go to the docks,” Gaby says, mounting the bridge a little quicker. “Extraction’s in five hours. We can wait in the car. Meanwhile—”

“Yes, two men and one woman in a car by the water -” Illya glances reluctantly to his watch and back again, staring at her, “- at almost four o’clock in the morning. This is not a milk van, some sort of morning delivery service. Police will see car at the docks at this hour, look inside, ask questions. It is not good idea.”

“— _Meanwhile_ ,” she finishes forcefully, “We have a tail.”

Illya tilts his head to look in the wing mirror. “I see nothing.”

“Because you’ve been glaring at me and running your mouth. Pay attention.”

He’s bolt upright then, sewn shut and seething.

“If you’ve quite finished,” Solo says, swirling a suppressor to the end of his pistol, “Gaby, I _suggest_ you take the main road. There are commuters nearby, even now. Arriving tourists. We’ll blend in somewhat seamlessly, so, if you’ll kindly turn on your lights—”

“Just let me _drive_ ,” Gaby stresses, and she shreds the clutch, from a languorous fourth straight to second and roaring, to a handbrake turn — into a butcher’s shop delivery bay, with a ferocity that makes both men stagger in their seats. She drops the window, “And here is another bright idea: get me something sharp, and be _quick_ about it _._ ”

Spurred by the venom, Illya’s over the back of his seat, rifling through his case for something to appease her snatching hand.

With his straight razor she snaps the strings of the butcher’s awning, swallowing them up in a taut cloak of white and red stripes, a canopy from the butchery wall to the guttering at the other side of the alley. It’s only shadow from the street lamps, little more than that — she can see clearly out of the back window, and all the world can see in — but it is camouflage for the paint job, and to obscure the lines of the car. More than enough cover if they duck down low.

She shoves the rear view mirror up and twists the wing mirrors outward, bouncing their reflections away.

“Gaby, we—”

She sinks low into the foot well, shoves Illya’s head down and close to the gear stick. “ _Shush_.”

Seconds pass, almost a minute. Illya is staring furiously into the upholstery, threatening to speak out. At his first breath, she clamps her palm over his mouth, only then to feel the hot vibration of his grumble, and does her best not to shift in her seat.

Solo leans against the side door. He braces the suppressor on the top of the back seat, trained on whomever closes in on them from behind.

An engine, black and humming, crawls by.

They are a parked car, nothing more.

She makes them wait for three more minutes, until the rumble of their pursuers blends far away into the drizzle and wind, beyond the pattering of rain on the awning overhead.

“Nicely done,” says Napoleon. Gaby elbows her way back up the seat, lets Illya sit up straight. “And what now?”

Gaby, with all the softness of a bag of screws, says, “We go to the safe house, of course.”

Solo quirks a brow.

Illya does not bite at the surrender; doesn’t cross his arms, tilt his head back in his way, as he does when he wins. Instead, when she reverses out from the shield of the awning, when he believes her not to be looking, he rests his chin in his hand to discreetly brush over his lips with his thumb.

\---

The safe house is ten minutes away. Close to the docks, but far enough away to retreat to the city centre, if needs be, to arrange for an alternative extraction.

It had been Illya’s idea; back at HQ just a week prior Waverly had graced him with a surprised smile for it.

 _Pay attention, Gaby,_ Waverly had said, having spotted her staring at her own plan, three late nights’ worth of work, on his desk in front of her. _You could learn something._

From anybody else it could have been a throwaway. From Waverly it was a direct rebuke, and it still stung.

And that was it, she realises then. The straw that broke the camel’s back. Her snapping in the car, a build up of bite after bite after bite for all her lost ideas over the months. Of course, thinking back on her behaviour at the wheel makes her want to slap her palms to her face and hide, but only for a moment. After that it feels good. They can all dismiss her ideas and wave her aside, but they can’t take from her the luxury of being indulgently angry.

The frustration feels good in her hands, in the set of her jaw, and she is tired of shrugging; tired of finishing three nights of paperwork, only for one of her partners to pick up a single notion and then be carried through the streets of London like a sultan.

She has good ideas. Plenty of them. Her mere existence has saved Waverly’s skin already; rendered his agency legitimate for fulfilling the first mission he’d pushed her into - high-stakes, world-changing - and she had done it, and the underworld of secret intelligence had taken note. It's how Illya Kuryakin and Napoleon Solo are here with her now, on loan to the fledgling agency of U.N.C.L.E., all because two years ago she had agreed to sit on Waverly’s doorstep awaiting his command.

She is a golden goose. Only idiots kill off a golden goose.

But her partners, sheepish now in her rented car, are mostly immune. They are only boys. She cares for them, but they do have a tendency to be colossal idiots.

Because for all the charm of Napoleon Solo, he still has the capacity to miss something lying blatantly under his nose, unless it is naked and sprawled out for him to take at his leisure. Rome had demonstrated that; she wasn’t a conquest, and so he hadn’t dug too deeply. Easy. A gambler at heart, if it isn’t a game to Solo he isn’t interested, and Gaby’s hidden fury is a rigged hand for which he doesn’t care to call her bluff. There’s no reward in challenging her. So he retreats, and she fumes, and then they meet together in an hour for dinner. He is not clueless, no, not even close, but he is very selectively attentive.

Illya is another matter. With Illya, as always, she can’t tell. He could already know everything about her and she would never find out. True, she had fooled him in Rome, but he has fooled her since day one — a walking contradiction of soviet poster child and high-fashion connoisseur; a bloodthirsty cannonball and a gentling gauge of her fears. She has seen him awake and asleep, wildly alive and almost dead, and yet still she cannot figure him out. Most frustratingly of all, it proves that he is _good —_ good at his work, however morally ambiguous — and the perfect enigma. No. Gaby has less concern for whether or not Illya can _read_ her anger, and more for what measures he would take to do something about it.

\---

They abandon the car three streets away. That’s Gaby’s idea.

Their work is almost done. Extraction in the morning, daybreak. They will rest separately, in two sparsely furnished bedrooms and a fold-down cot in the living room.

 _Who will sleep in the cot?_ Napoleon and Illya begin, once they are safely into the hall of the apartment. They practically fight for it, hissing whispers. Solo can stand a cot, he’s military. Illya is, too. No, truly, Solo _prefers_ the cots to the mattresses here - threadbare, thin as paper, laced with taut springs. No, Illya will sleep in the cot - the cot is longer than the bed, and he is more comfortable stretched out. But Solo—

Gaby’s teeth are dust before she can even unlock the door. She kicks off her shoes, washes her face, and brushes her teeth without another word to either of them. It’s only when she’s undressing in one of the bedrooms, fifteen minutes later, that the hard curve of Illya’s straight razor drops heavily to the floor.

She stares at it, long since forgetting she’d even stuffed it in her skirt pocket. It’s a simple lacquered black, its hinge a plain steel. She picks it up, opens it. Her reflection is a harsh sight, so she forces herself to soften her scowl. _Frowning gives you wrinkles_ , she excuses emptily, unwilling to consider anything else. Unwilling to consider that, perhaps, she doesn’t even want his belongings to see her sulking like this.

She hears Solo groan into a stretch, then turn off the living room light; an announcement that he is the undisputed winner of sleeping on that accursed fold-down bed. He had only wanted to win, no matter what the prize. And then, like clockwork, she hears Illya’s door close firmly as his rebuttal.

Gaby changes and waits for Solo’s breath to steady to deep sleep. Then — honestly, without truly thinking — she folds the razor closed, tucks it into the waistband of her pyjamas, and creeps out to leave.

How had Illya slinked off to his room without a sound? Did he scale the walls? She curses every floorboard in the ancient house for creaking, warping under her bare feet.

Napoleon sleeps on his side, his shoulders far too broad to let him sleep on his back in that tragic berth. He’d be better off on the dilapidated sofa, the idiot. Possibly better off double-bunking with Illya. That almost makes her laugh.

Illya has spotted her, has been looming in his doorway since the moment she’d stepped out of hers. He’s in his undershirt and his trousers. Naturally, as a man on the brink of pursuit from dawn til dusk, he still has his shoes on.

She holds his chastising eye and dares to walk the rest of the hall to meet him.

“You have not slept yet,” he reminds her, hushed for Solo’s sake.

She watches him carefully as she lifts the hem of her pyjama top only an inch or two, taking great delight in the furrow of his brow, to reveal the folded razor at her hip.

And then it hits her, this terrible, brilliant idea, perhaps her best yet, an offer he won’t refuse — she won’t give him it. She’ll show it to him, but she won’t give it to him. See what he does now. What great idea he has next, how best to one-up her.

He is immobile, staring at the handle peeking out at him. “Thank you,” he manages, low. “I forgot—”

“You forgot?”

“That you have it. Had it.” His hand flinches at his side.

“It was a good idea,” Gaby says.

Illya glances down the hall, to the prized bed and the sleeping lump upon it.

“You want to talk.”

She hadn’t expected that. She lets her shirt slip back down — but he stops it, just the hook of his finger holding it there, like securing a flag at half-mast. And there she feels his knuckle, careful, grazing into the dip between her stomach and her hip and it’s a shiver, terrible, brilliant, the best yet, irresistible, just as she’d planned. He touches her and leaves her just as quick, holding the still-warm razor in his clenched fist. He is burning, knuckles white. He has left goosebumps in his wake.

“I can talk,” she says.

Illya nods. He steps aside to let her in under his arm and, with a dart of his eyes down the corridor and back again, he shuts the door.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Gaby’s eyes are trained now, so when she sees Illya’s suitcase leaning upright by the door she dissects it. It’s a natural place for it to be, really, but the sight prods at something in the base of her chest. She doesn’t want to look into it, the feeling. It’s only a suitcase, for god’s sake, and _of course_ it’s by the door — he’ll be leaving soon, because _she_ will be driving and _he_ will need to get into the car quickly if anything goes bump in the night. So what is it, then? Something about it burns into her head: register this, remember this, and in a few years time you will see it again as if it were only yesterday, and it will hurt but you’ll be glad you took the time to do it. You could learn something. _You could learn something._

Illya has already closed the door behind her. He’s watching the back of her head as she stares dumbly at the thing, at the case by the door.

“Talk,” he says.

Gaby looks over her shoulder. He has moved further into the room, is needlessly straightening the paperback on the table by his bed. Like that, she has completely forgotten what she’d come for. _To give him his razor,_ she thinks forcefully, blinking.

But Illya the Enigma is patient, and he waits for her.

“I snapped at you because I was angry.”

He nods.

“But you deserved it.”

He nods again.

“So, what?” she prompts.

“This is about the plan,” Illya says. “At headquarters. Your three night plan.”

Gaby stares at him. She scans over his ears for the receiver, the bug. “No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is. In the car, we pushed you back again, as we have many times before.”

She blinks, considers shaking her head; _what are you talking about, lumbering Russian? I came to give you your straight razor. In the dead of night, when you need it least, not at dawn when we’ll meet in the living room to pack up and head home, but now. I have come to give you your razor. That’s why I’m here._

“It was a good idea,” he goes on, straightening. “Your plan at HQ.”

“But yours was better.”

“They are equal. Only, at that time, mine appealed to Waverly, and yours appealed to you.”

“What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“Waverly is your boss, not critic. It is not personal.”

“Tell me your handler has never made it personal.”

Illya is dead silent then, and she begs for all the noisy floorboards to swallow her up.

“Sorry,” she mumbles.

Illya nods again, shallowly. “It is okay. Go to bed.”

“I won’t be able to sleep.”

He gives her a look.

“You woke very quickly,” she says. “When Solo made the shot. You were up and out almost before I was.”

“It was a loud shot.”

“You were awake.”

Illya holds a hard stare. She doesn’t waver under it, only wishes she were a little taller to meet him there evenly. Across the room he towers, blocking with his shoulders the light from the street. Some special agent. He hadn’t even drawn the curtains.

“I was,” he admits.

“Then you heard everything.”

“Most of it.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What would you say?” she pries, her pulse quickening. “A contract with U.N.C.L.E. A deal with the KGB, a flat in London, or New York, international - a mercenary, really —”

“Gaby—”

“What would you do?”

He shakes his head and her heart sinks, only then he goes on: “Now is not the time for this. We should go to bed. To sleep.”

She crosses the room. If he were anyone else, he’d press back against the window, possibly try to climb out of it. But he has a cover of his own to maintain, the poster child, so he stands stock-still, lets her get close.

Nearly toe to toe, in fact. “Or would that all be a bad idea?”

“It can’t be done.”

“Why not?” she presses. “Waverly’s judgement, you say, is not personal. He can be swayed, pushed. I can do that for you.”

“I do not doubt that.”

“Then what? You think your father still wants you there, at the heels of the men who sent him to the Gulag?”

“Gaby.”

She’s pushing too hard, still has an armoury of jabs left to pick from. “I think you are smarter than that. And I think he would want better for you.”

“This is not about my father.” His hand is on her shoulder now, heavy as a brand. “Why are you saying this?”

She fumes under it. She doesn’t shrug it off. “Because I want to.”

“You are always fighting.”

“I have to, or else nobody will listen to me.”

“I listen to you.”

 _Then answer my question,_ she thinks viciously, but it won’t fall out that way. “Answer my question, Illya.”

“I want to.”

“Then do it,” she says. “Tell me to ask Waverly for you.”

Between the poles of Illya Kuryakin there is a tear, then, running straight down the middle. She can see it. A dark little cove to hide in, and she wants to crawl into it, right into the rift of his chest. She is close enough. For all the proximity and thoughtless confession, he seems to get it, and is synchronising now, finally, to show it to her.

He splays his fingers softly over her shoulder, his thumb at her collar bone and resting there. “Let me think on it.”

“Fine,” she manages, burning up.

“I am on your side.”

“For now.”

His hand slips but she pushes it back. _We could go to the beach again._ She forms the words in her mouth, but they don’t come. _A café, a bar, a museum, without cover. A weekend, or a holiday, if you move to U.N.C.L.E., if you’d just relent._

“Now, will you please go to bed?”

“Is that an invitation?”

He stares, steady as a rock. “You have spent too much time with Cowboy.”

“That’s an interesting thing to say.”

A shake of the head, slow. There’s warmth in him, a tiredness. “He has corrupted you.”

“Hmm.”

Beneath his calculation, a very slim light in the dark, she swears he is almost fond. He peers down at her. “Your trick,” he says. “At the butcher’s shop. Clever.”

She gives a demure nod. “Thank you.”

“And with my razor—”

“It was the first thing you handed to me.”

“No,” he shakes his head again. “Your trick, bringing it back to me that way. Again, clever.”

“A trick?” she feigns surprise, desperate to mask the blood in her cheeks. She’s glad the room is close to black. “The Red Peril can’t be tricked. At least, never twice.”

“A trap, then.”

“Well, did it work?”

“Well,” he echoes her, low. “Am I not caught, now?”

Her hand is on him, on the stretch between his chest and his shoulder, his undershirt generously thin enough to let her feel the heat beneath. She supposes he is.

“Should I let you go?”

“You say this as if I cannot leave, as if I need your permission.”

“We both know who would win that fight.”

“You are always fighting,” Illya says, only it’s closer now, warmer, and it hurts less. The hum in his chest is vibrant under her fingers. How had she let him speak every single day without feeling it for herself? A waste of time. _Inefficient,_ Illya may have offered, if the bug in her head were switched on; if it could register anything sensible amidst all the fizzing static inside her.

He isn’t listening in, though. He is staring at her instead, willing her eyes to do the hard work for him.

 _Well?_ She thinks, pulsing her fingers. He feels it. He flexes subconsciously around the new touch, getting used to it. _What are you going to do now?_

He does lower then, having found what he's been looking for, to tilt his head and press his lips to hers. She swallows, lets her eyes drift closed. Dry and soft, and so warm — she wonders if he feels her breath too, held close to death behind her thundering pulse.

He parts from her but she chases after his mouth, stretching up to grab the nape of his neck, part his lips, breathe finally into him, bringing him back. He moans — and there’s that hot vibration again, the one he’d burnt into her palm, sending a madness through her she still hasn’t recovered from, only now it’s over her lips, and holds a deeper heat, a desperate one. _God,_ she thinks,  _he’s trapped her now._ She clings tighter, tugging him the impossible distance down to taste more; to run her tongue over his and marvel at how it could bark such harsh Russian and still be so smooth, rhythmic, lilting. How? How? _How?_

Where had his hands been before they touched her? They’re beneath her now, palms hot and pressing into the underside of her thighs, and she’s rising, and he’s moving with her, and he’s pressing her against the narrow wall by the window, where he holds her with such _ease_.

She isn’t certain she’s breathing, not wholly. He’s taking it out of her, and he’s winning the fight, showing her up. The bell will ring any second now. The strap of his watch pinches the skin through her pyjamas and she needs, more than anything, for them to be torn off her.

He’s at her neck, mumbling something in his mother tongue that makes her want to cry, aloud this time, _what are you talking about, lumbering Russian?_ He’s figured it all out; the humming against her skin, the heat of his breath and rumbling of his voice, the deepest she’s ever heard; how it drives her wild. Deduced it. She wants to thump his shoulders — tensing there, to hold her tight — for pushing her like this. Then his tongue soothes over the sharp graze of his teeth on her neck, and it’s the only thing that matters in the world.

“Gaby—” another stifled moan, but he means for her to reply. His hands tighten on her thighs, and she wakes a little.

“What?” she whispers. “ _What?_ ”

“You should go to bed.” But he’s still working over her with just as much fervour, tasting and humming and back on her lips again.

She grins against him. Absolution. How does he cling to caution when she can only feel his mouth and think of nothing else?

“Then I suppose I will,” she says lightly, loosening around his waist.

“No.” A kiss, the soft patch under her ear. “No, _bohze moi,_ no.”

So she loops her arms around his neck. She lets him in closer, lets his hips push her higher, with one hand under her thigh and the other on her waist, kneading, caressing. She knows then that he could do this all night. Unless, somehow, she were to tire him out.

And then the synchronisation betrays her. Illya leaves her neck.

“No,” she says mindlessly, flinching for the sound of it in her throat. “Don’t leave.”

She’s slipping down the wall, gentled by his hands, back to her own feet with far more weight than she remembers. A burdensome weight. She wants to climb back up, hang from his neck until he buckles to the floor with her.

“You must go to bed,” he says. “Please.”

“Don’t you—?”

“Yes.” His hand is so broad, so hot at the curve between her neck and her shoulder. She tries not to lean into it. “A lot. Too much. So you must go to bed.”

He’s well versed in hiding laboured breathing. She wonders how much he can see of her at this side of the room; whether it would change his mind if the high blush on her cheeks would show, the spreading numbness of her lips, too. The street lamps light little of her in this dark corner, but he is washed with gold. It catches his lashes, dials down the blue of his eyes to something warmer. He blinks slowly and it’s a plea, but she has not seem him like this before; Illya is black and blue, not this. Another side to him, a parallel she must try to find the seam between.

“Fine,” she says, not meaning it one bit.

He’s pained. He presses a kiss to her forehead, her temple. He shouldn’t do that.

“Think about what I said,” she warns quietly.

“Which part?”

She’s about to snap, but he’s smiling at her. A rare thing, private. He should close the curtains, blindingly bright as it is, or else he’ll give away his cover.

“Very funny,” she says. 

Illya kisses her a final time, closely, a plush press that makes her closed eyes roll back a little.

 _Oh no,_  she thinks.

_Oh, no._


	3. Chapter 3

Gaby knows cars. She can discern one vehicle from another of the same make, same paint, same age, in no more than half a glance. Registration plates are a tedious last resort, like demanding to see a sibling’s papers; needless, perfunctory. Like faces, every last car is different, and tells its own story; the diligence of care, the dip of weight on the driver’s side, the wear in the tread of the tyres; it's an entire dossier on the owner, too. People and the condition of their possessions come in pairs.

So, when she spots the black saloon car — the very same that had tailed her the night before — ready and waiting at the dockside that morning, she confidently suggests a change of plan.

Telephoning Waverly from the airport is a start. He agrees to have his secretary reserve three seats on the next flight, staggered through the classes, and rearranges the pick-up from Heathrow back to HQ. It’s a quick exchange. He seems to be in a pleasant enough mood, so she takes her remaining time and jingling Dutch guilders to push her case.

“ _The two of them? This is quite the tab you’re mounting, Miss Teller._ ”

“But it _is_ possible.”

Waverly is quiet for a moment, letting a roaring plane pass overhead without interruption. “ _It can be looked into. Bumped up the list, so to speak. Now, in your case, Agent Solo is already half-won. I can manage Sanders. Kuryakin, however, will prove tough for us both_.”

“I can handle it.”

“ _You know, Gaby? I do believe you can_.”

“Sir,” she offers, uncertain.

“ _Apologies for your dismissal last week, agent. Know that your work does not go unnoticed._ ” He pauses, for a sip of something hot. “ _On that note, a tip was called in to head office this morning, commending your forward-thinking on the getaway. Well done_.”

Gaby glares back at her partners, loitering together by the taxi ranks like a couple of goons. She thumbs over the battered phone booth directory, considering which of the two had compensated her; which of the two she would beat up first. “Thank you. But, really, it wasn’t much trouble.”

“ _Given your track record, I thought just the same_ ,” Waverly says. “ _It seems that being underestimated makes for a fountain of praise when one’s peers bother to pay attention._ ”

Gaby hums.

“ _For your good behaviour, I’ll be on the phone to the right people today. When you return home, I’ll look into something pleasant for the three of you. Perhaps somewhere hot. Oh, and procure for me some of those little windmill-shaped biscuits while you’re there, would you?_ ”

“Of course.”

“ _Keep up the good work, agent. You’ll be notified on any advancements_.”

“Sir,” she says, admittedly warmed, and lets the phone click out.

When she reaches them, Illya stoops to pick up her case. “Ready to go?”

“One stop. A biscuit run,” she says, measuring him.

Naturally, he provides no tell, only a curt nod of understanding for Waverly’s proclivities. Boarded up, lights down, come back later; he’s switched off, now, impossible to pry open without upsetting something fragile, as if her kiss had made him an envelope, sealed tight with hot wax and stamped shut.

\---

“Look at this,” Illya says, disgusted. “Imprints, on the forks. Needless. An entire machine constructed, powered, to push these letters into steel. Do I not know where I am sitting? Do I need reminder?”

They wait now at Heathrow airport for their driver to deliver them back to HQ. All three of them bode well to avoid waiting in a gaggle together, an odd sight wherever they go. Separately, however, they are equally as compromised. Gaby invites creeps; Solo, impure invitation; and Illya, police intervention. To sit down is to submerge the three of them below eye-level, another three buoys in the sea of anonymous heads, and that is how they end up drinking in an airport bar at half past one in the afternoon.

“It’s luxury dining, Peril,” Napoleon chides him. “If you’re enraged by personalised forks, just imagine what they do to the napkins.”

“Monograms.” Illya grimaces.

“ _Embossed_ monograms.”

“It’s so that you won’t steal them,” Gaby tells him, desperately trying to catch the attention of the waiter.

“Yet they let _you_ in here, Cowboy,” Illya says. “I hope the paintings are welded to the walls.”

“You know full well that wouldn’t stop me.”

Gaby does her best not to think of walls, or of things secured against them.

She sips from Solo’s scotch and deliberately avoids his curious eye. Illya is becoming infinitely more difficult to look at with every gulp too, so she avoids him most of all. She has already spotted, with alarming and unwelcome clarity, that he is clean-shaven — carefully so, having taken his time to use the razor she'd deliberately warmed with her skin. What had he thought then, watching himself in the tiny safe house mirror, that black lacquered curve in his palm? Did he think of her? Is he thinking of her now? Does he know? Can he hear it, in that bug of his? She waits for him to touch his jaw, his neck, anything.

“Nervous, Gaby?” asks Solo, accepting the return of his glass.

“Thirsty.”

Despite her best efforts, Illya’s eye draws her then like a magnet. So calm, unreadable.  _The better operative_ , she thinks bitterly. Or, perhaps he is genuinely unmoved by all he has done to her, and all she has done to him. That thought is bitterer still.

Certainly, that morning she had been fine. It had felt like a little game between the two of them, hiding something sweet from Solo. They had been sat apart on the plane, so she had almost managed to lose herself in a book. She could still see the top of his head, of course, blond and neat over all of the seats. That didn’t help, but it was avoidable if she slipped down low enough or looked out of the window. Regardless, she had handled it.

But now she’s three glasses in and flagging fast, melting a little at the edges. Illya seems to be imploring her to sit up straight. Or perhaps he’s begging her to forge a distraction, so that they can be alone. Or perhaps he’s channeling a celestial intervention to ensure that they may never be alone again. She can’t _tell_. She can’t tell, because even after kissing him wildly in the dark, looking at Illya is still like looking into a mirror and an M.C Escher all at once; neither comfortable nor satisfying when she’s already so full to the brim with doubt.

A waiter tops up her glass a fourth time, eyeing her similarly. _It’s half past one in the afternoon_ , he seems to remind her, with a punctuating spin of his bottle to catch the drip.

She nods her dry thanks at his burgundy waistcoat, sipping shiftily.

“Did you sleep well?” asks Solo. He’s twinkling, nauseatingly attentive.

“Yes.”

It’s half true. She’d gone back to bed, albeit reluctantly, when Illya had asked her to. It did take her another hour to find sleep, being so numb and alight all at once, but the eventual sleep itself was… fine. Needed. Blissfully empty of thought. All three hours of it.

She craves it now, that sleep. Illya — just sitting there like nothing is mortally off-kilter, like he isn’t strung out and coiled in all at once, as she is — is an impossible thing to take in. It’s embarrassing. It’s infuriating. It’s a huge and terrible mistake.

She all but guzzles her wine.

“Perhaps coffee,” Illya says, low. He flags down another waiter.

“Lots,” she urges.

They drink a blend Napoleon deems acceptable in a soft, companionable quiet. Illya looks over the runway, Solo looks over the wait staff. Gaby looks over them both with a strange pull that feels like time is slipping away, dragging them with it.

More powerful than the discomfort of seeing Illya in the daylight — and that’s a substantially debilitating one — is this new sensation. One that feels like mourning. _It’s the wine_ , she curses, and that’s true. But just as she had gawked at Illya’s suitcase by the door, she looks the same way at the two of them now; memorising, because she knows she will never have a photograph of them. That, and the thought that their next mission, perhaps even the one they’d just completed, could be their last.

There it is, that pulse in her head again: remember this. Remember this, because for Gaby Teller all good things go and all good people leave, eventually.

But what if she could break that chain? Link and loop it around her finger until the iron weakens, snaps, forces a jolt in the mechanism? A fragment, she thinks. Three little links could exist independently of the whole.

Perhaps if she upended a table, as Illya is often inclined, something would change. And then, if she did, Solo would assure the whole airport with his quicksilver tongue that his sister is ill, and they would believe him, distracted by the astonishing sight of him, before her two boys would usher her out, arm in arm. Then she couldn’t really be angry for their protective grip because she craves it, still, that hold on her; steadying her at her worst, when she knows she can do better — when they only let her burn out because they know she can do better, too. They would wait for her to calm, and they would still be there when she woke. Over and over.

But for how much longer?

She doesn’t do any of that. The wine has ruined her a little. She drinks her coffee and, when she believes she cannot sink any lower, an unspoken reassurance is ripped out from under her feet. The unthinkable. Solo excuses himself to use the restroom.

Even Illya, the insurmountable Illya, straightens in his lonely chair.

“I won’t be long,” Solo assures them, traitorous and wholly aware of it. His eyes dart as if waiting for one of them to rise, ready to whack them back into their seat with a carnival hammer. Satisfied, he goes to weave amongst the tables, leaving them to brood.

And then there were two.

“I had believed you would announce your plan to us here,” he admits, once Solo is out of earshot. It saves her from filling the thickening quiet herself, no longer as companionable as it is foreboding.

“My plan.”

“Your campaign to have us defect.”

“Transfer.”

“Of course,” Illya says, unconvincingly. “Transfer.”

“And? You have thought about it?”

“All night, all morning.” He shifts. “It has been difficult to concentrate of late.”

Gaby retreats behind her coffee cup, sipping as slowly as is natural. “You don’t say.”

“I am not alone in this.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“You are red. You have been red all morning.” There it is, that smug tilt of the head, the cross of the arms. She has been waiting for it. But he is smiling, just a touch, with that deceptively soft, warm mouth of his. There is not a single shade of pink in him anywhere else. She wonders if, ironically, soviet Russian blood might run blue.

“What’s your point?”

“My point,” he says, “is that you are very persuasive, but I have not yet reached a conclusion.”

“Well, thank you for reporting in,” she drawls.

“All hope is not lost. I may be corrupted yet.”

“If you are asking me to repeat last night’s sales pitch, your negotiation skills could use some work.” She smiles at him, saccharine, and returns to her coffee. “I don’t work with amateurs.”

The corners of his mouth twitch a little. “It is a heavy choice to make. Besides this, my word is only half of your deal. The other—”

“I will handle the other.”

He gives her a look. Not pitying, not remorseful, but something in between. Disbelief.

“Why did you ask me to leave last night?” she asks, watching as he stumbles over it.

The look dissolves.

“Gaby,” he manages finally, gritted, trapped. “Not here,”

“Then _where_?”

Across the bar, Solo leaves the restroom. She fights the instinctive flinch of her eyes to him; lets him sink closer, a broad sweep of fine blue through the rosewood fixtures, sailing amongst the chairs. She can’t watch his hands, but she imagines they’re swiping steadily.

Like an angel, then. A blessing. Solo wouldn’t let her questions go unanswered. He’d ask them _for_ her. This is his sort of game; prying into Illya’s head with that safe-cracking gambler’s hand, to pick through the tightly folded tickets and find himself a winner.

Perhaps his prayers would be answered, too — he could release his entire cache of euphemisms every day of the _week_ , if only he knew. If only she could gift him the secret, threatening now to spill out of her and over the table, like stolen sacramental wine. If only she would tell Solo that she knows, now: she knows how Illya Kuryakin tastes.

Yes. Solo had incentive and adequate ammunition to make Illya open up, and she had questions for them both. A ploy — have them both join U.N.C.L.E., permanently, for their own sakes as much as hers. She does care for them, after all. She only pushes because she knows they are chasing it, this chalice just beyond their reach. If she'd dare them to say yes, they would naturally fight to upstage one another, on and on, until she would win them both. A jackpot, baiting buyers at an auction to bid higher, to go one step further.

A perfect plan for the perfect team.

“Well?” she prompts. Solo is ever so close now.

But her time is up. Illya has spotted him in the mirror-backed fretwork behind her head, and he clams up tighter. He knows her plan, top to bottom; she’s thinking too clearly, showing him too much. It’s a fierce challenge to outmanoeuvre a chess master, but at least she had come close. She wouldn’t forget it.

His lips press into a fine line, with only the most minute shake of his head at her. A bad idea. A terrible idea. And now, truly, like a clam, it would take nothing short of a vat of boiling salt water to open him back up again.

“Peril, my god, you won’t believe it.” Solo sits down between them, bringing with him a waft of expensive soap. “The towels are monogrammed. The public restroom towels. Raspberry Egyptian cotton, gold thread, single use.”

“My god,” Gaby echoes dryly. “Illya, you look like you could kill somebody.”

 ---

 

 _The Kiss is right_ , she thinks, finally alone in her flat. The perfect shared title for two semi-lethal weapons, and Illya’s mastered them both. Aim for the soft spot. Go for the knockout. KGB training for KGB’s best: _The Kiss._ The curse, more likely. Completely immobile for twenty minutes to — she pauses to count — nearly nineteen hours. _Do not touch._ He’d gotten that right, too, like everything else.

Sitting, she can only feel the press of his fingers under her thighs. Standing, she feels the absence of his ridiculous height. What can she do with her useless hands now, having felt the blond bristles at the nape of his neck? No, her own neck is worse. Looking closely, there’s a mark under her ear she hadn’t even spotted until just now, long after having flashed it around from Amsterdam to London like a scarlet letter. His teeth, his tongue, etching her with his signature… She had only pulled back her hair to wash her face, and there it was, a personal attack; a brand, overstaying its welcome.

She touches it. It’s numb.

Gaby flops onto her sofa, phone in hand. She shakes out the cord, twists it around her finger.

She could call Solo now, tell him everything.

How is it that, despite all her plotting at the airport, it all feels like a crazed, colossal betrayal? A great shame? Secondly, how could she ever stomach the embarrassment of confession like this when she’s already in knots for it all alone? Gaby Teller has never done this before. She has never fallen on her back, palm to her fevered forehead, pondering on who to call about some idiot driving her wild. She’s never done it before, and she won’t do it now.

She sits up, stands up, drops the whole telephone on the sofa, goes to turn on the radio, and turns it off again.

She’s too tired, still hasn’t slept since returning from the debriefing at HQ.

The taxi home had been complimentary, but the driver had been too; a new driver, asking too many questions, nervous, clammy, eyeing her. She'd asked for his badge, scanned over his license on the dashboard. Legitimate. He’d worn a hat, but still it revealed the shorn hair at the back of his skull, where he was peppered with lines, bald scars, as if bitten there by a dog, or a bear.

Forging all of her answers, naturally, only exhausted her further for the ever-lengthening marathon of lies.

She’d asked him to drop her off two streets from her flat, braving the rain in favour of shielding herself a little more, assuring anonymity.

Because Gaby knows creeps as well as she knows cars. She knows them, and she can handle them, for the most part. She doesn’t have the men at the garage to see them away anymore, deny them her business, but she has hardened herself a little. It’s another thing to keep on top of, a nuisance she can't avoid, but it is necessary.

For all her building suspicion, she’d wandered all the way down her street, feeling his eyes and headlights on her back, and into the hotel opposite her building for ten whole minutes, until finally the taxi wheeled around and left.

It still leaves a sour taste in her mouth.

Sleep will help, she considers rationally. Less rationally: _unless I dream of Illya_. And she will, most likely, with how much of her day he’d already rudely foisted himself upon; just being there, with his mouth and his shoulders and his hands, flaunting them all over the place, mocking and powerful, so far away and too damn close.

Illya. More daunting to her than every creep in town, in his way. Could he not just walk behind her? Duck into the shadows if she happened to pass his way? No, because he is everywhere, and the fact that she is as glad for that as she is mortified tells her that, maybe, just maybe, she has been spending too much time with The Twins Kuryakin.

But the polarity of him at all times! Ubiquitous, and then oceans away. To get him in one place, to hold him there, make him _prove_ that he isn’t two people all at once, would erase a lot of her supernatural doubts. Now, she can’t be sure that he doesn’t just float in on a breeze to taunt her, or that he’s any more than an endless hall of mirrors in a suede jacket, with only a skilled mouth and two unbelievable hands to part him from an icon of cold, hard glass.

No wine, she promises herself. No more wine.

And yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part four is already written! Will hopefully post it tonight - just a little more editing to do :) Thank you so much for your comments and kudos so far!! I've loved writing this, and your support is such a huge deal and honestly makes my day. Thanks again! Back soon xx


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully the ridiculous length of this chapter makes up for how long I've taken to post it! I promised Sunday, yet here I am on Tuesday, reeling. Hopefully you'll forgive me; I'm 3.5k into the next chapter (and I promise... Listen... I promise, there is more to look forward to ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ), and wanted to have the majority of it completed before I posted this one, so that the wait won't be too long for you all!

The intercom screams at her to wake.

Gaby’s eyes roll open, dry, heavy. She hears them click with it. The wine did defeat her, sending her to sleep beautifully stupid, humming, hot.

She had also collapsed on the sofa, just as she'd promised herself she wouldn’t. Her record player hisses emptily, and the telephone has fallen off the hook, hissing at her too, right in her ear, demanding that she dial or get lost.

Like a pit of snakes, this place. Hiss hiss hiss.

Punctually, the intercom buzzes at her again. Again. Again. She pushes her palm to her temple, frowning through the blur. The room is dark, but the curtains are still open, only the sheers drawn. God, she had only just met sleep. She doesn't dare think of the dream she'd left behind.

More of that cursed, deafening buzzing. Shorter bursts now, impatient, insistent.

She hauls herself up, shuffles around the couch, picks up the intercom handset from the wall.

“What is it?" she manages, barely more than a groan.

“ _Gaby? I am here._ ”

“Who? Here, where?” But she knows who, and she knows where. It only takes her a moment to sluggishly meet herself again. It is Illya, and he is outside, downstairs, in the drizzle, at — squinting now, at the clock — half past eleven at night.

“You should go to bed,” she says, a little too sharply.

“ _You have visitors._ ”

“Visitors.”

“ _You can confirm the spot outside? The car, black, by the hotel._ ”

Gaby drags her gaze to the window, which patters gently with rain. “Wait.”

She sets the phone atop the mounted box and, with Illya’s voice shrinking behind her, heads gravely towards the window. She moves the sheers aside, just a margin.

Below, lit by a halo of orange, the black car. A dint on the back wing, poor correctional paintwork on the roof. ‘58 plate, Dutch— the registration, her last resort, seals the deal, and it’s a crooked one. The tail in Amsterdam.

Something terrible chills through her. A ferry ride to England, a drive from the coast, perhaps as far as Portsmouth, into London… A long way to drive for a visit; for just a stop at the hotel across this quiet, residential street. The hotel’s many, many flags of the world sag pointedly at her in the rain; _Pay attention, Gaby. You could learn something._

How stupid she had been to have taken the taxi as far as she had — for it must have been the taxi driver, after all, that had tipped them off. Undoubtedly. But she had been so tired, then. Drunk, still, and so sloppy. She’s only glad her wine-fuelled, seasoned anxiety had pushed her through the hotel lobby doors instead of into her own building; a precaution she’d felt necessary and instinctive in the pit of her stomach. At least it had bought her this time to gather herself; to wake to Illya’s insistent buzzing, and not the barrel of a gun. She thanks herself for that. Thanks Illya too, latterly.

 _Bad things come in threes,_ she thinks. Seeing that same car for the third time assures her that it is the last. Why hadn’t they changed cars? Covered themselves? Somehow, this is far worse. Cover is for those with something to lose. No, this is retaliation for their shot in Amsterdam, and they are not shy about it. A confidence like this means broken glass, raised alarms, bullets spraying.

The dark suddenly looms like a thousand grabbing hands. But she stops herself from turning on the living room lamp. She has been trained for this. Trained to consider that, when something feels amiss, it’s best to first maintain stasis. Assess, sustain, react. So she lingers in the dark just a moment, considering, considering.

Illya can’t buzz at her while the intercom handset is off the hook. It takes a moment to even remember he’s there, no longer the greatest threat to her pulse and sanity tonight.

She picks it back up, and he senses her.

“ _Please, Gaby, come down. Let me in. I will explain._ ”

So four flights down a few minutes later, with her aching muscles only just joining her for the ride, she tackles the building’s front door and its many, many locks.

And there Illya stands, wet and dark and towering. His right hand is inside his jacket, gripping his concealed pistol. He’s lit like a statue from behind; stern features, so tall. So tall.

 _Ah, so I have only fallen back to sleep_ , she thinks sluggishly. _This is only a dream. A nightmare._

Illya nods at her, darts his eyes, and slips into the hall. With the gentlest brush of her arm — only to move her aside, and a touch she loathes to strain into — he closes the door behind him.

“I could not pick these locks. What is on them?”

“Solo refitted them.”

“Of course,” he says, visibly chastened. “Considerate.”

“I tune his car, source his repairs. It is only fair.”

He nods again, a nervous habit, and checks the latches thrice over. Finally, he turns to look over her.

“You were asleep,” he says, and there’s weariness in his voice too.

“It is so obvious?”

He smiles gently for only a moment, an affirmation. It’s so nice to see him.

“After you,” he says then, gesturing to the stairs.

She leads him, scanning every shadow as they wind up, and notes the unusual glow beneath her neighbours’ doors. Lights on, televisions humming, floorboards creaking under slippered feet, the smell of coffee. A shared laugh, somewhere, even so late at night.

“Your neighbours will be fine,” Illya tells her, hushed. “The tail knows your street. They will also know your door.”

She doesn’t tell him about the taxi driver. Not yet. When they are inside, in the privacy of the dark, she might. She is still reeling a little with shame for it. He would only pass rebuke if she addressed it too carelessly, whine at her for a while. It is better this way, for now. It's not as if he's never kept a secret to spare himself.

“That’s little comfort,” she offers instead.

He hums grimly.

When they reach her landing, the very top, Illya turns his back to her to peer down the stairs again, scanning, his pistol drawn.

It is nice, she thinks, as she unlocks her door, to have someone at her back. Something about it lightens the load. His company — even after a solid week of nothing but — is still whole, and warm, and though that’s dangerous territory, she pushes rational concern aside in favour of the way it soothes the shake in her hands; the heightening of her senses coming down to something parted, split, like sharing the burden. Equally rationed, Gaby’s fear is, now. With a disconcerting ease she feels she could get used to it.

And then she’s inside, and Illya is with her, and her door is bolted shut.

“Tea?” she tries, reaching for routine, as if this were anything close to normal. “Some coffee?”

“Tea, black.” He takes in the living room in one slow sweep. He doesn’t turn the light on, either. “Please.”

She pads into her adjoining kitchen to turn the kettle on, and he begins pacing the perimeter of the living room.

She can’t tell if he’s employing strategy or simply being nosey; scanning over books and records and strewn cushions as if they could pose a threat, as if they could provide him with intel. Of course, Solo has already been here before. Illya has not. Not once. She’d hoped, long before this whole mess unveiled itself, that it would have been under more leisurely, potentially handsy circumstances.

Gaby stirs his tea. Now, she can’t stop the spoon from scraping the sides. Her hands are shaking again. Her imminent assassination, maybe, ought to be at the forefront of her mind, but it isn’t. Not wholly. She rationalises: there is no window in her kitchen. Snipers cannot touch her here. _That’s_ why she feels secure, soothed, as if she is indestructible; why Illya’s presence is now as much a catalyst for calm as it is for the chaos thumping through her chest. On the one hand, there is nobody she would rather have on her side. On the other, she now has another mark to keep an eye on; another reason to consider throwing herself out of the window tonight.

“You have fire escape?”

She nearly jumps out of her skin.

“Yes,” she manages, turning to glare at him. In the doorway, he shrugs out of his jacket. His hair is still dripping.

“Where?”

She hands him a fresh tea towel. “The bedroom, at the back.”

He nods, as if it is the only place it would be. Naturally, it would be there; nothing to look into too deeply, or consider for too long, or to redden the tips of his ears. But redden them it does, and he seems to realise it, so he makes use of the towel to dab at his soaking hair, his neck, and covers them.

Gaby hands him his tea, their fingers absolutely brushing.

“You have a handgun here?”

“One.”

“Find it,” he says, and folds the towel neatly. He hesitates to put it on the table, glancing at it, then at Gaby. With her silence, neither affirmative or negative, he shyly leaves it there, a mark of his presence at the scene of the crime. She softens a little, wondering all he’s thinking. “We will wait for them to come.”

 

\- - -

 

Gaby is accustomed to being on edge. A getaway driver, she is a veteran in adrenaline, anticipation. But then, she tends to harbour a control over her vehicles, a manipulation of the road. Here she is a sitting duck, not a golden goose; hostage, bait, victim. It peels at her. With a ridiculous duality only Illya himself could challenge, she feels both relief and madness for not being alone to handle it all herself.

Instead, Illya is perched by the fire escape in her little bedroom, staring out at the dark street below. Listening. He is concentrating so hard, straining so intently, that she fears a whisper from across the room could burst his ear drums.

So she sits on her poorly-made bed, watching down the hall to the front door with her pistol, suppressed, in her tired fingers.

On moving in, she’d refitted the door to open inwardly, making any intrusion an awkward stint face first against the wall before revealing even an inch of the room. It would give her more than enough time to spot any secretive entry; she would catch the painted wood flaring at her, warning her, and take the shot before the trespasser knew, literally, what had hit them. Little precautions. Unsettling, a nuisance, but again, necessary.

It has only been an hour. She has already called Solo, but sadly not to gossip. He is parked now at the end of her street, in the car she’d tuned for him, waiting, scouting. He had agreed to provide surveillance, but not before asking: _Now, why is Illya there, Gaby? There’s your real mission objective. A real page-turner. Have the intel on my desk by Friday._

 _Just be careful_ , she’d told him, through gritted teeth. Illya had been sitting at her vanity then, barely listening but attentive enough, while looking over the fire safety plans for the building. He’d just commended her on tucking them away for safe keeping, and it was still warm in her chest.

 _Gaby, you know I’m never careful._ Solo had said, droll. _You two, though. Commie infiltration is a very real threat. Penetration from within is a tacti—_

She’d hung up.

He did have a point. Not about _that_ , good God, but a point nonetheless; she hasn’t yet quizzed Illya on his alibi, his presence here. In fairness, she still hasn’t told him about the taxi on a premise of wounding her pride alone, though she knows that to be childish...

But what cause has he for spotting that black saloon at this time of night, twenty whole minutes from his own accommodation?

He had turned up on her doorstep unannounced, and armed. Suspicious. Paranoia prods at her again, heightened by the night so far. Suspicious, the Russian, unwilling to transfer, impossible to breach, lurking outside her flat in the night like, she thinks, shaken now, a spy.

Perhaps for all his quietness, for all his _not-now_ s and endless dismissal of her questions, he had only been wired; not listening to her thoughts, as she’d suspected, but to her speech, clearing the line for whomever else was listening to focus solely on her, on Solo, too. Quiet, for whomever else was listening now, in her room, and in every room they’d been in together. Illya, an open line, reporting everything she’d said to him. _I would have done exactly the same in your position._ It echoes in her now, bounding off every wall in her seemingly ever-thickening skull.

At the window, he seems to fill with that same synchronisation she’d once craved but now dreads; the transmission of her thoughts like a live wire, loose and kicking up sparks again, catching his scrupulous eye, churning his blood. He turns then to look at her, pulled as if by an invisible leash.

“Something is wrong?” he asks.

Who is she answering to? Illya? The KGB? Are they any different? The army of his halves merge now, like a zip yanked tightly up the middle. A man moulded by the cruel hands of officers for two decades, for only one cause. _Truly_ two marks to keep an eye on, now. Fear, just a little, comes in, and it darkens the taste in her mouth, spikes at the lips he’d once pressed his own to with such apparent sincerity. A trick? It stings like one. Like a slap on the wrist.

“Why are you here?”

Silence. He is listening.

“Illya.”

“Backup,” he says tersely. “The tail. The Dutch. Do you want me to leave?”

Gaby’s hand wavers, just for a millisecond, over her gun. It’s despicable, but her body has already done it for her. An instinct, a reflex. She isn’t fully to blame. It’s fright. Paranoia. She isn’t herself. But then again, neither is he.

“Why are you _here_?” she demands.

“Gaby—”

“Here, at night, on my street. How did you know the car was outside?”

He chances a look down to the gun in her hand, steadied low on her lap. 

“I came to talk.”

“About what?”

“Well, you ask me: when, where can we talk? So I thought I would come to speak to you here, alone.” He huffs, all hope of concentration lost. Whatever legend he’s conjuring now, it costs him greatly, because he lets the sheers drift closed to end his stare across the street and pierce it into her instead.

“I tried to call, but the phone would not ring. Now, I see you have left it off the hook.” He points at her then, dead serious, “Don’t do that again.”

He waits for her to nod. She won’t do it. He can’t expect anything of her now.

“So,” he goes on regardless, unrelenting. “I decide to walk to your flat, and only when I reach your street do I realise that this is a thick-headed thing to do. It is late; you will be sleeping, and how inappropriate it is, coming to your home without invitation. Then, I see the black car by the hotel. I look inside. Nothing. No Dutch men at the hotel, the man in the lobby says. I have him show the guest book — there has been no check-in all evening. So, I cross the street and press every button until I find you, the last, of course, on the panel, and you let me in.” He pauses. “Your neighbours are very angry with me. This is why they are all awake, now.”

Gaby’s chest aches. _Stupid_ , she thinks. More stupid than withholding intel on the taxi driver is the thought that Illya, this giant wad, staring out of her bedroom window to catch the bad men in the night, would try to outsmart her so ham-handedly. KGB, maybe, but not Illya, who knows her. She begins to believe she may be able to discern between the two. She begins to allows herself that.

Only a little hesitance remains, and it is easily settled. She has tested him before; slapped him twice and wrestled him to the ground only to pry at his seams, to see if any red incentives might leak out, to get a grasp on what she was dealing with. She had seemed to be an anomaly then, untouchable. She will test him now to see where his loyalties lie, almost a year down the line. For her own safety. Her sanity.

“Come here,” she says, level. This would prove his trust in her. These things come in pairs.

Illya glances back at the window only briefly. He brings his pistol with him and, when he reaches the end of her bed, he reluctantly lets her slip it from his grasp. An immediacy she hadn’t expected. Of course, he is still deadly this way, hands obediently by his sides but nonetheless two weapons of his own. But he had let her, in this state of alert, disarm him, and she hopes in more ways than one.

For her first test, she plants her head squarely against his torso. She knows well all he could do to her there. It’s a dare, more than anything else. She lets him thread his fingers through her hair to hold her there for a moment. The rise and fall of his chest above her head is a little sharper now, betraying him, but it’s a haven here, the solid weight to lean on.

There is nothing taped beneath his sweater. No wire. She feels only his abdominals tense involuntarily against her.

“Sorry,” she mumbles over him. Her second test, though she does truly mean it. Two birds, one stone.

She feels his nod. “I am sorry, too.”

Sincere, broken. Passed.

How vulnerable this all makes her. How easily he could still retire her here; finish her off for good, having managed to mislead her yet again. He’s fooled her, tricked her, wolfish and cunning. How mindless and careless she has become, letting the enemy cross her threshold twice in one night; first to her home, and then again into her bedroom. Bad things come in threes, so where would she invite him next? Inside her chest? In her German fairy tales, this is where the heroine gets what’s coming to her, and we all learn a valuable lesson. Gaby could learn something. But she won’t.

Illya takes her head from his stomach, her cheek soft in his hand. Why do they always end up in the dark? When will she see him in broad daylight and feel this same touch on her? She misses him. Why always in the dark? What is he hiding?

One last test.

He lowers then to a crouch, one he reserves for rifle fire. He braces his palms on her knees. From here, he must look up to hold her stare. He does, and it’s dizzying. A power she has over him, something that makes her greater for a moment. She could get him now. She could snatch both of their pistols and have him standing, both hands up, if he crosses her.

Illya stays down, even as she brushes her fingers over the crossed pistols in her lap. Just a test. The third and final, and he passes that one too, resigning to hang his head and sigh, his temples laid bare to her, if she were to shoot to kill, and still he breathes over the backs of his hands and down her pressed thighs like Illya, and nobody else.

She lifts his head and leans to kiss him, a knight’s reward, and he kisses back generously, and then with pain, and then with nothing at all.

“Illya?” She presses against his lips again, harder, meeting only an unwilling wall.

_Oh, no._

He swallows, looks back into her lap. She can’t watch the door now, or even think of her pursuers with all the weight of him there, and weighing heavier still. If he doesn’t look up soon, he might bring all the building crashing to the ground, taking her with him, crushing the Dutch men too, all her neighbours, everything.

“This plan of yours. It has not worked.” It is quiet, contemptuous. For her or for himself, she can’t tell; she is numbing already, cold in all her digits. “I am leaving soon. No contract. I came to tell you this.”

“No.”

“I do not know how long for. A long time. I think—”

“Shut up.”

He stares at her, jaw clamped. Gaby wants to take a fist of his blond hair, pull him back, dare him to say it to her again.

She doesn’t. Her hands are useless. 

“No," she whispers. Then, firmly, "No. I only need more time. There's more time.”

“No.”

“ _Yes,_ there is.”

One broad palm leaves her knee to take her hand. She slaps it away, snatches it back in a fierce grip, just as quick. She wishes she could stop being so hard and cruel.

Doesn’t he want to just rest for a while?

“Waverly said he’d send us somewhere hot when we came home,” she tells him.

“Gaby...”

She doesn’t stop him, but he won't go on. “You couldn’t just let me kiss you? You had to do this to me now?”

“You should know," he says quietly. "Before.”

“Before _what_?”

“Anything else.”

Her throat hurts. “I thought you were spying on me.”

Illya frowns, grips at what he can of her hand. It’s a deadly grasp, hers on him, vengeful, but he doesn’t flinch. He has never held her hand before. She takes it back before she gets used to it.

“You think I am double agent?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think.”

He’s still kneeling, bowing. She gives him his pistol, still cold and heavy in her lap, and he takes it, only to put it on the carpet next to him. He gently lowers to give, of all things, a soft kiss to her bare knee.

“Don’t.”

Illya looks up at her, hovering. So blond from here, even in the dark. Blue, blue eyes. She would have gone wild for this just hours ago, has even thought of it before. He idly circles her bare ankle with his thumb and forefinger, and she wants to kick him for it.

“I don’t know how long I will be gone,” he tries again. “It is likely I will not return to U.N.C.L.E. They say there are enough operatives here, and want me back. They have work for me now, in Novosibirsk.”

“When?” It’s hollow.

“In three days.”

“So, what?” she hisses. “They have no one else in that prison of theirs?”

“They want their best,” he says. There is no pride in it.

“You want to go.”

“ _No_.” Illya presses his head to her knees. His heavy sigh rolls down her shins. He could kill her doing that. No guns, no hands.

“Then don’t.”

Ghosting over her still, “You make it sound easy.”

“It is. Don't go.”

“I must.”

"More time, Illya," she presses, pleads, shame abandoned. Three days are so small. Small enough choke on. "Just a little bit more." 

Illya shakes his head, buried in her. 

She lets herself scarcely touch his hair. The rain has softened it, her tea towel messing it boyishly. The towel will still be damp on the kitchen table, still would be when he'd leave. And his cup, the last of his tea.

He has her calf in his whole hand now, burning her. He kisses her knee again, though she’d asked him not to. He kisses the inside, the crease, and she lets a small cry form in her mouth but it won't fall out. More like a sob in her chest, childish and tired. So tired.

In the alley, distinctly; _chute-chute._

Gaby’s bolts to the window, leaving Illya and his freshly-kneed nose behind; his blue eyes watering with it, and with all the new blood a thick curse in his throat.

Her heart’s already in hers, alongside a tearful, ugly lump — she can’t even stutter an apology to him, isn’t sure she wants to. Her pistol points down between her cooling knees, shaking uselessly, as she crouches at beneath her open window.

The fire escape rattles many floors below, protesting under foreign feet. Her heart leaps, stutters, thuds. _Now? Why now, when she's weak like this?_

Solo, a dark blur at the end of the alley, aims again at the metal ladder: _chute-chute_. A collapse — something, a body, falling to the tarmac below with a grunt.

“The door, Gaby. Three more,” Solo calls up, German, a smooth echo bounding along all the walls.

Illya’s back on his feet, knuckling at his eyes, still streaming reflexively. He runs his arm over his bloody nose and sticks his head out of the window beside her, taking her place. Spotting Solo, he shouts back and forth to him in Russian, snubbing the eavesdroppers himself. She watches him climb onto the fire escape to push up, up, up to climb onto the roof top, where more foreign feet are stomping still.

Gaby hurries into to the archway of her kitchen, trains her aim at the front door, the door she’d rigged, to wait, wait, wait. How long? How long! The footsteps are coming up the building’s stairs now — impossible to discern how close, with Illya and Solo still shouting, firing now, _chute-chute chute-chute_ , and no doubt landing every one.

She steadies her grip, both hands. The living room door, flaring, slams open and in a blink she knows the intruder; the hat, the back of his head, the scars, and she fires three times, hitting only once, but it’s enough.

Another follows, tripping over the body; two more in him too, the shoulder, the neck, and he’s down and gurgling.

Her heart stammers just waiting on the third, but the final is the smartest, firing instead through the brittle wooden door and down the hall, skimming her, spraying white wood chips, splintering her door frame.

She ducks into the kitchen and the front door is rammed fully open, the third intruder stamping over the bodies and into her living room. She lets him come, edging herself ever lower. She’s crouched now, pressed flush against the counter; knows he’ll be scanning at eye-level for another man with a gun.

Gaby lets him shout “ _kom tevoorschijn!”;_ lets him hear Illya hurtling back down the fire escape to her room; lets him run mindlessly towards the noise. And when he passes the open door to her dark kitchen, not once flitting a look inside, she steadies her aim and shoots him, squarely, in the back of the thigh.

He falls, shouting, with another shot in the back, a third to the head, and then she’s out, all eight shots gone; she’s been counting, can only hope no one else has too.

She scrambles shakily to her knees and up, kicks away the handgun he’d dropped in the fall. She kicks his arm too, checks his slick pulse. Nothing, stone cold. She goes back for the others robotically, empty-hearted, as she’d been trained. Her heavily-scarred taxi driver. She kicks him barefoot twice and far too hard, for good measure. 

“Gaby,” Illya says, already at her bedroom door. There’s more blood on his hands, his face, both his own and countless others. He stares at the body outside the kitchen, and at the pile by the door. “Two more, on the roof. Solo took the last below.”

“Handled?” she hears herself say.

He nods, discreetly catching his breath.

“Then I will call for removal. Just the six?”

“Gaby,” says Illya, splattered, towering, staring at her. “You are shaking.”

“Aren’t you?” she accuses, picking up her still-hissing phone from the sofa. She can barely fit her fingers in the rotary, shuddering traitorously as they are.

He crosses the room. “Let me do it.”

“No, I can handle it.”

“I know.” He nods at her again, closer now. He tries to take the phone from her grip, his own uncommonly steady. _This is his work_ , she thinks bluntly. _No need to shake with anger after a job well done._ Softly then, contradictory, an enigma; “Please. Let me.”

Tired, so tired, she lets him take it. She stretches out her numbing arms, turning away from the mess leaking into her carpet behind her, in front of her, everywhere. Like Solo, she has other men in wetwork. She’s been trained to move on from this, but Illya and Napoleon have many more years on her, and this is where they count. Illya’s furtive glances are, at least, somewhat sympathetic.

On the phone, his details are deliberately stark; six down, fourteen shots total, the alley, the roof, top floor, number 16, living room. He looks at Gaby then, gently turns her on the spot as he had always enjoyed. No injuries, he tells them, his own blood a river down his face. Bruised, but not broken. Good. She has always liked his nose.

Gaby takes his arm, the one holding the telephone cradle, to drag it over his bloodied mouth. He only watches her, agreeing with the clerk at U.N.C.L.E.’s removals desk, confirming the address. She lets herself touch his clean lips then, memorising them, perhaps a little more forcefully than she ought to. She makes it hard for him to speak. Between his mumbled answers, he kisses her fingertips. He mouths _sorry_ when his blood touches her.

Distantly, she hears a pointed clearing of the throat. Not at the door, no, but all the way down the hall. A warning, don’t shoot, it’s only Napoleon Solo, doing what he does best; instigating cosmic interruption. She can’t loathe him for it. He has already used his powers for good tonight, returning like a play’s forgotten narrator to bend the world back under his tongue. He needs, as much as Illya, to balance his two halves; level out his valour with a little mischief.

He knocks at her door before peering around, stepping over the bodies on the floor. He closes his eyes disdainfully when the blood seeps from the carpet to the underside of his shoe.

“You’ve handled this?” He gestures at the floor.

“Yes,” Illya says, having just hung up. “Twenty minutes.”

Solo looks at her, brow quirking. “I suppose this is your handiwork.”

“You suppose correctly,” she says evenly, but she could fling her arms around him then. God, if he didn’t deserve a tasty secret tonight, to keep him well fed; reward him for fighting his bodily design to work alone, just to watch her door in the dead of night. She would tell him everything. She would tell him, and Illya would have to let her, because he owed him that too.

But what is there to tell Solo, now? What _could_ have been? Offer him a plate and a fork and a napkin but no cake to eat. _That was the idea, anyway,_ she’d have to say. _That’s what I could have won, had I managed it. But anyway, here are the dregs, the stale crumbs, sorry._ It all lands in her stomach like a stone. Mission terminated. She wonders if Sanders has denied him a contract too, despite all of Waverly’s meddling, and he only holds it from her now because she’s shaking in her dark living room, feeling devastatingly powerless, and likely looking it too.

“Peril,” he says carefully, “I trust you’ll escort Gaby to a suitable hotel.”

She’s drowning in it; the dripping suggestion, this cautious love of his own kind. She can’t find the heart to chide him for speaking as if she isn’t here because, in truth, she barely is. Let him have this one. He’s earned it.

“Of course.”

“All right.” Napoleon brushes some of the white plasterwork from Gaby’s shoulder, picks a splinter from her hair. He flicks it into the carpet. “I’ll be around. Call me, Gaby. Peril, I’ll see you in the morning.”

And with that, she knows that Solo has heard ‘three days’, too. From where, she can’t tell, but he knows that Illya is leaving. She reads it in the hands stuffed in his pockets, in the new distance of his glance; as if Illya is sick and he doesn’t want to come too near.

Illya only nods at him.

“You will find a hotel, too,” Gaby blurts then, alarmed by the turn of his back by the door, like, she thinks bizarrely, a packed suitcase on two blue legs, ready to desert her too. “They will be after you. There will be more.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“Well, I do. So.”

Illya’s hand pushes lightly on the small of her back, and she flinches away from him. He’s determined to finish her once and for all, leave her for dead. Removals will have to take her too, bundle her up with the rest of the stiffs and shuttle her down to the morgue. Taken too soon by the merciless, duplicitous hand of Illya Kuryakin. 

“So?” Solo prompts her, quietly heartened.

“So,” she says, in the only way she knows how, “Don’t be stupid about it.”

“I’ll do my level best.” He flicks a glance at Illya, deciding to swallow whatever else he has to say. “You should both get to a hotel. You don’t want to be here when removals arrive. How would _you_ propose cleaning two fresh bodies off a slanted roof?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> APOLOGIES for the angst. Oddly, I am strangely nervous about this one? I know it's for the best, v pivotal, and yet!! can't help but mourn being able to write these two babies smitten and well-cared for forever. Know that all will be explained soon! trust me! I promised a slow burn, and so will likely be on very own deathbed before these two get any god damn privacy. Have a little faith!! shan't be too long until the next chapter, and thus, a little ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) 
> 
> but mostly: thank you so much for the support! Your comments are so insightful and lovely to read, and I'm so glad you're all sticking around for the long haul. There's a lot left, certainly another two chapters, but I promise eeeeevvveerything will be cleared up and explained very soon! forgive me for now xx


	5. Chapter 5

“No more hotels,” she tells him, when he slips into her car for the sixth time.

Gaby has stopped entering the lobbies. She sits instead at the wheel, where she had last felt a little control. She waits for him to beckon her inside; _there’s a vacancy, only one, in you go_. But he hasn’t. Not once. Each and every time, he’d leave the bright lights of the canopied hotel doors to join her again, direct her to another hotel just a few streets away. Again, and again, and again.

It is almost one o’clock in the morning.

He had let her drive, though he’d been half-way to forbidding that, too. Not that he could have stopped her. She’d thrown such a vicious look at him that he’d decided the battle was better left unfought. She’s exhausted, yes, but she’d cling to her car for as long as she lived, or at least until that was stolen too.

Gaby expects him to shake his head. _One more_ , he’d say, and has before. She half hopes he will. Sleeping in her car would be less nauseating than sleeping in his flat, or even just stepping inside it before he goes. Three days. _A lot can happen in three days,_ she tries, a little emptily, but repetition breeds strength, and she is preemptively stockpiling as much of that as she can.

This mess has made such a fool of her. Weak as a child. She’s sick with it. This is the reward for getting too close. To her family, to her foster father, and finally to Illya, and of course bad things still come in threes, so she really ought to have guessed it. Mirrored men like Illya break crookedly, leaving only bad luck in their wake. She deserves it now, for letting this girlish infatuation steer her off course. Never again, she promises. Reluctant, half-hearted, but necessarily: never again.

“Ok.” Illya nods. “No more hotels.”

She starts the car, clutches the wheel tightly. “You will have to tell me where to go.”

He nods again. He has already wiped the blood from his face and hands. Eyes firmly on the road, she notices this only when his hands enter her peripheral vision; pointing redundantly, though he still says _left_ and _right_ , and so she knows already where to go. It is bittersweet, seeing them.

They pass by his barber’s, his tailor’s, and the park in which he runs, he says, or sometimes only walks. He notes them very seriously, as if urging her to commit them to memory; in case she’d ever need these little landmarks. What good would it do her? She doesn’t want to hear them, yet still she strains to listen. Hearing him recall the small pieces of his life, these placeholders, gives her hope that maybe he’ll grow homesick enough to come back.

  
\---

He has left her alone in his living room.

But he hadn’t right away. No. She’d crowded him, had him flush and hesitant behind her, leaning her whole weight back against him just seconds after he’d closed the door. _Why?_

Listening to his shower humming away numbly down the hall, she can’t help but loathe the way she’d handled it.

Leaning back into the full length of his torso had been a forbidden thing; like resting an elbow on a painting, like treading mud into carpet. He’d breathed a stuttered exhale when she’d drawn his cheek down to meet hers, when she felt the point of his wounded nose in the shadow of her cheekbone. They looked together out of the window. And what then? She could take him down in one, a casual fuck like all the rest and she could pretend, when it was over, that leaving him would do her good.

But Illya had given her two left hands. She couldn’t reach for him. She only struggled to find the touch she wanted, and then didn’t want at all. With no more than a light graze of her knuckle up his thigh, she’d let them fall uselessly. He’d sighed. She couldn’t tell if it was relief or disappointment. She had learned nothing of Illya Kuryakin.

She’d opened her eyes to find nothing in front of her or behind. The buckle of his belt against her back had melted away, and all the weight and strength behind her evaporated.

His pillow is on the sofa now, assurance of where he plans to survive the night. She touches its centre, lets it rise, pushes it back down again, and she waits for him to return.

Illya’s flat is as expected. Clean, sparse, monklike. No art, no cushions, nor rugs, nor mirrors. Not remotely close to Gaby’s at first glance, but he lives similarly in one way; he is also quick to be sure that his possessions are unsentimental and, ultimately, disposable. They have both learnt that much at least. They both seem to know better than to cling to souvenirs. Certainly, her costume engagement ring still rattles in her bedside drawer. But it is only carry-on luggage. A crumb among the rest. It would be a waste to leave it. It is still a pretty thing. Small, harmless.

On the walls there is noticeably very little. But above the phone there is a calendar — comically tiny on the great wallpapered expanse — with a red tassel and a gold hook, covered in Cyrillic, both his own hand and in faded type.

With a tinge of self-destruction she stands, and she takes to the calendar, doubtful, but still she lets the pages flip flip flip, all the way to September, where, as she had dreaded, he’d marked her birthday. Sunday the 13th. Only _Gaby_ , carefully scribed in black pen.

The telephone rings. A different pitch to hers too but a ring nonetheless. It rings again, and again, only inches away.

She picks up, says nothing.

It’s a long one, this waiting game.

“ _Now, you’ve either thrown something at the wall, or you’ve had your tongue cut out._ ”

“Solo.” The cosmic interrupter.

“ _You crafty thing, Teller. H_ _ow did you weasel your way up there?_ ”

“I was invited.”

“ _Ah,_ ” he says, smug. It seems to have been the right thing to say. It’s his winner’s voice. 

“And you, calling him at half past one in the morning?”

“ _Heartsick and keening._ ”

“Of course.”

“ _I thought I’d find out which hotel he’d packed you off to_.”

“Well, I’m here. What do you want?”

“ _Cut out the middle man. Very you_.”

“I assume you’re the middle man?”

“ _Clever girl,_ ” he offers dryly. “ _Now, you’ve been distracted of late, Teller, so since you’re here I’ve decided to bring an end to it.”_

She doesn’t welcome the renewing dread in her stomach, tenfold now, but it’s there, and it’s waiting. To have one minute of steadiness is surely not too much to ask.

“ _Firstly,”_ he says, _“your little tryst in Amsterdam was not even remotely discreet. You, Prima Ballerina, have all the dainty footwork of a construction worker.”_

Gaby allows herself to scoff then, a little rusty with disuse. Still, a distant relief floods through all her tired bones. “God, Solo, I’ve wanted to tell you. You can’t know how stupid all of this has made me.”

“ _No, Gaby,_ _I do know. I’ve had to look you both in the eye for three whole days. Quite the contrast, really, the before and after. It’s been an awfully bad play. I’m exhausted._ ”

When will 'three days' will stop conjuring a thick black cloud around her head? Behind her, on cue and far away, Illya’s shower stops humming.

“ _And, on that decidedly pregnant pause, I’m actually calling to drop Peril a little good news. You, too, once I’d found you. Is he around?_ ”

“Well, I am.” Her dread wavers, water in a tilting glass. “Out with it.”

“ _And where’s the man himself?_ ”

 _“_ Showering. _”_

“ _Oh, Gaby—_ ”

“Save it.”

He sobers a little with the viciousness of it. _“I’m armed only with explicit instruction to call Waverly first thing in the morning. He seemed pleased with himself; said he’d called to thank me, in fact, before disappearing off to wherever it is he goes at night… Does he have a wife? A relinquished Countess?”_ He thinks for a moment. _“A daughter? I’ve never had a Lady. Well, the titled kind. A princess, however —_ ” Another voice then, followed by Napoleon’s muffled apology and a promise to hurry.

“You have company.” Gaby pinches the bridge of her nose. “Tell me you are fully clothed.”

“ _I’ll do no such thing_.”

“Then make it quick. What does Waverly want?”

“ _Naturally, I can’t disclose all the details, and the few I can certainly shouldn’t be shared here.”_ Or, rather, in front of his midnight company. For all his vices, Solo is still vigilant in his way; they are still reliably synchronised, all these hours and miles apart, and she knows him. _“Have you secured Peril’s phone? He keeps an insulator in his desk. Russian, but it does the job. A grease monkey should figure it out easily enough.”_

“Please, Solo.”

He huffs, and he quietens a little. “ _Look, I made the tip, Gaby. To HQ. To apologise for my backseat driving, mostly, but also to get you back in Waverly’s good books. A commendation; overcompensation, maybe, for your good work in Amsterdam. Not that I’d needed to; the old man applauds when you walk in the damn room. He actually scolded me for expecting too little of you._ ”

She swallows, toys with the tassel on the calendar. “I assumed it was Illya.”

“ _Of course you did. Come, now. Do you think Peril has ever made a voluntary telephone call in his life?_ ”

She smiles at the floor; waits for him to joke again, lighten everything in his way.

“ _You do know, don’t you._ ”

There it is, like a popped balloon. Just what she’s been waiting for. He’d forgiven her for withholding the tryst from him; her friend, her confidante. But no, certainly, he wouldn’t let this slip right by him too.

“Know what?” she tries, and it’s her worst lie yet.

“ _I’ve never seen you so shaken.”_ It’s very foreign on him; how hushed it is, how sincere. _“How’re you doing?_ ”

“I am handling it.” Second worst. “You?”

“ _Don’t worry about me.”_ A perfect echo, word for word. A smokescreen for intimate situations such as these, to fill the disquiet in the air, in him.

“So, you commended me,” Gaby says, saving him. “What of it?”

“ _Well, it turns out that Waverly owes you the world. Again. Speaking loosely,”_ \- and he lowers his voice now, more a murmur than a whisper - _“There’s been a little rearrangement among the KGB’s priorities which, alongside your own intervention, may fall in Peril’s favour; stretch the departure dates a little farther, so to speak. You seem to have pulled the right strings at the right time.”_

 _“_ What strings?” She can’t imagine, for a moment, that she’s managed to do something right. She had thought she’d lost herself and all her talents in this great mess; dropped the ball, broken the hand that clutches it. Her heart’s high in her chest, thumping away, though she wills it to be calm. “What rearrangement? Solo? What are you talking about?”

_“Gaby. Gaby, you’re going to have to trust me. At least until tomorrow.”_

“That’s all you have?”

“ _That’s all you need. You have my word.”_

“And I suppose I have no choice but to believe you? Take a thief on his _word_?”

“ _I prefer director of acquisitions,”_ he says passively. _“Are you listening to me, Gabs? Peril’s ultimatum is, if not cancelled, likely indefinitely postponed. Waverly has the details, and more work for us yet._ ”

“Postponed.”

“ _Indefinitely,”_ he stresses. “ _I’d hesitate to buy fresh eggs; we’re likely to be deployed somewhere new tomorrow afternoon.”_

 _“_ Tomorrow?” her head reels, her clutch on the phone iron tight. “Where?”

 _“No idea. Waverly only demanded I get a good night’s sleep._ ”

“And so you’re on the phone at almost two o’clock, and have gone and found yourself a bedfellow.”

“ _You and me both_.”

“You’re terrible.”

“ _Luckily,_ _your adoration for me is unconditional._ ”

She is still filling with a faint glow, a little ember now. “And what should I tell him?”

“ _Illya? Will he sleep better for knowing? He's not fond of uncertainties._ ”

“He might.” She twirls the cord, peers over her shoulder to the bathroom door. The shower has long since stopped, only his rattling through the cabinet to be heard from here. She lowers her voice. “He said he would not be returning to U.N.C.L.E. What has changed?”

“ _Waverly has all the particulars, Gaby._ ” He's distracted, backed closely by a clatter of something, two distant howls of laughter. 

“But what do _you_ think?”

Solo hums. “ _Somehow, Waverly’s plan is more pressing than Peril’s being stationed in Siberia. Enough incentive for you-know-who not to snatch back their best agent, after being pushed too hard to give him up._ ”

“A big deal, then.”

 _“Certainly. Speaking of which, and I know you’ve been dying to ask: yes, you have my blessing. Absolutely take Peril for all he has. If his shoe size is anything to go by, you’re in for a treat_.”

She almost hangs up. Then, bizarrely curious: “You know his shoe size.”

“ _Introduced him to my shoemaker._ ”

Gaby closes her eyes, heartened. “Of course you have a shoemaker.”

And of course he’d taken Illya shopping, made a day of it. She feels immediate sympathy for every sales clerk and tailor that’d crossed in their path, but it warms her with a light love she’s missed all the same. She loves them. She loves them both and, for now, they aren’t going anywhere. Not definitely.

“So, it is safe?” she asks, quieter still. She’s still clutching the cord, winding it around her wrist. “For me? Tonight, I mean, obviously. Don’t think me stupid for asking.”

There is a strange avoidance in Napoleon Solo, one that repels intimacy, vulnerability. But tonight he is invested. She seeks him because he, more than most, knows how to self-preserve after this brand of surrender. He likes to be consulted on the work he does best.

“ _Safe?_ ” He’s taken by that. “ _Gaby, that’s the smartest question you could ask._ ”

“You understand.”

“ _Honestly?_ ” A shift, bedsheets perhaps, and a distant groan. “ _Give in. He’s noble, moral, if a little red. If all comes along fruitfully, pardon me, you’ll toy with him for a long while yet. If not—”_

“If not?”

_“Enjoy it while you can.”_

“Solo,” she starts, then stops, oddly tongue-tied. She idly touches the mark on her neck. Still numb. She hasn’t allowed herself to think of it in a long while.

“ _Hmm?_ ” Content, a little wistful. Hopefully it’s for her, not drawn from him by his company.

“I’m glad you called Illya at one thirty in the morning.”

“ _Have fun, Gaby. Tell Peril all you know if it’ll soothe his fevered brow. Expect an interrogation tomorrow; from me on matters after-dark, and from Waverly for tonight’s… decidedly less lascivious affair. Just don’t forget to call him_.”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep until I do.”

“ _I’ll bet_.”

She does allow a laugh then, her black clouds evaporating one by one.

“ _You know, if I were a gambling man, I’d say you’ve gone soft_.”

“You are a gambling man." She smiles gently. "Goodnight, Solo.”

“ _I’ll see you tomorrow. You’ll do well to wear a scarf this time.”_

“Good _night,”_ she urges, and returns the handset to the hook.

So long to wait. Hours and hours before she can call Waverly at a decent time, pull all the secrets from him. No, there’s no chance of her sleeping. But another plan winds suddenly through her now, pushing insistently at the blood in her neck and refreshing that little, forgotten bruise...

 _Waverly owes you the world_. It echoes more boldly than all the rest: things are turning, changing, opening up. A rearrangement, a change of schedule — so, what? Is she to have a little blind faith now? Solo had only asked her to trust him. He wouldn’t plant false hope in her, having seen her so worn only hours ago. Not without substantial leverage. It is nice to have someone so resilient at her side. Solo; where all the world has snatched up her blood relatives, it has dropped for her at least one rock to depend on, worldwide. 

The other, she senses, stands right behind her. She can feel him at her back again, only a little further away.

“What did he want?”

Indefinitely. Postponed indefinitely. Illya, suspended behind her.

She smiles at the wall, can’t hold it back even a little bit. “Wrong number.”

“Gaby.”

She turns to him then, and he’s in his bath robe, very close, unwittingly so. How nice. She has never been more pleased to see him, more free of all her jumping nerves. Whether it's a leap of faith or not, something snaps in her, lures her closer. Now, there seems to be nothing at all to lose, if only she just gives in just a little. As if Napoleon had given her a great big golden key, she moves with purpose, feeling very infinite, very indestructible. She touches the fold of the robe at Illya's neck, the roll of towelling, dark blue.

“Gaby…” he says again, only now there is nothing stern about it. What must he see in her face, since he really hasn’t a bug in her head anymore? A blush? She isn’t embarrassed or fearful. Heated, maybe, for this open-ended interval ahead of them; a little corner in all the chaos to huddle into with him, close, daring, with little consequence, until their time is up.

Well, certainly there’s a blush now.

“Your three days,” she says mildly. “You are committed to them?”

“What do you mean?” So guarded, measuring. He’s so squeaky clean, exhausted, and still he is readying for her to fight him.

So she tells him.

\---

 

The room is so quiet she can hear Illya’s metronomic breathing. He’d shaken his head so vehemently for so long that it’s a wonder he isn’t dizzy enough to fall down.

Gaby has run a marathon, could collapse on the sofa herself if he’d only move out of the way. But he looms over her. At least his nose has stopped bleeding. She wants to push his chest back, splay her fingers there.

“You asked if you are safe,” Illya says distantly, and she balks.

He had asked almost every question she had posed to Solo herself, and that had filled her with the strangest, closest warmth. Now? Unpredictable, suspicious. He can cross her still and, for all this hope, he could go anyway. He could say no to the contract - say no to her - and travel to Novosibirsk regardless. Perhaps he had only been waiting to be dragged back - recoiled from her second kiss because he'd no use for it, going home in three days, and so, she thinks pettily, back to Russian women, if he'd ever had them. It is preservation, to jump so quickly to suspicion, to doubt. For all her good news she still hesitates, just to be safe. Because he has motive to leave, and she has not worked hard enough for him to stay. There, he is the KGB's best. Here, he is one of three, and often teased, upstaged. His work for U.N.C.L.E. is not for the cause his heart beats on for; for the ideals whacked into his head from boyhood, never to be shaken off with promise of anything the west could give to him. The west, or his partners. Expendable, both. 

“You were listening," she says instead, a blow into her few remaining embers of optimism.

“It is my job.”

Gaby stifles her tired smile, decides to carry on. She looks instead to the stretch of dark terrycloth over his shoulders. She wants to smooth it with her palms, trace over everything underneath. She comes alive with the knowledge she has the time to do it, from now to indefinitely. If he'd stay.

“Yes,” she says. “I suppose it is.”

He waits for her.

“Well, I wondered if it would be safe to…?” she gives a gentle shrug, trails off. He flinches then, and swallows as she brushes over the hollow of his throat, the one patch his robe hasn’t yet been so tightly wrapped over. “Is it?”

“What do you think I will do?” he asks, still as stone now. “Hurt you?”

“I hope not.”

“I would never.”

Gaby hums. This is almost easy, and she has missed easy. She lets her fingertips glide up a little, feel the stubble appearing at his neck, his jaw. How long had it been since she’d first thought of him shaving, in the restaurant at Heathrow? His straight razor, likely tucked into his bathroom cabinet by now to cool off, to simmer down… Is he thinking of it too? Would that night keep him here, even just to see what happens next?

She’s at his jaw when he speaks up.

“What are you doing?”

“Memorising.”

He smiles sadly at her, and she touches that too.

“I have never thought you sentimental.”

“Gathering intel, then,” she says archly. “Patrolling the perimeter.”

“Enemy acquisition.”

She smiles back. Finally, she is coming closer still to the Illya in-between; where he can play, tease a little, not hazard a glance at the door, hunt for a microphone in his lapel. A little hope, maybe. He looks only at her now, with fondness and, she reads enthusiastically, a little yearning.

“I hope all you have said is true.”

She beams, plays with him. “I’ve been known to tell a white lie.”

“To get what you want.”

She shrugs lightly.

“You are not tricking me.”

“A third time? Pfft. Never.”

He frowns firmly, shakes his head. “No. You did not trick me second time.” She considers showing him the mark on her neck to prove it. “Trapped,” he insists. “You had my razor. I had little choice.”

“You made your choice, Illya. You took it in both hands.”

He opens his mouth, closes it, presses his lips together tightly. How he hates to lose.

“Quite greedily,” she goes on slowly, closing in, watching him. “Really, most unlike you.”

“And you, so quiet. I did not recognise you.”

“I don’t have to be quiet.”

She thinks then that maybe she has killed him. So she snakes her palm around his neck, touches the bristles at his nape. She’d missed those.

“That is not what happened,” he manages.

Gaby smiles up at him, widens her eyes the way he likes. “Really? Then how did it go?”

“You need to debrief?”

“I fear I’ve forgotten.”

“Forgotten,” he scoffs. “I think not.”

But she has him now. His full attention, won over. Trapped again, with his smug smile fading and his eyes, darting once between hers, focusing now on her lips.

Swallowing, he lets her pull him almost all the way down to meet her.

“Ah, yes,” she says, and he nods at her mindlessly, barely brushing over her. “Now I remember.”

“Then—” he begins, but he doesn’t finish, only takes her thighs to haul her all the way back up, wrapping her around him, with her skirt bunching back to her hips. He has her bare legs taut in his hands in only seconds. Very efficient. Every wave of his pulse, every steadying grasp of his fingers is minute and sensitive. Measured. If she holds her breath a little longer, maybe she will hear the steady ticking of his watch. Feel it, even.

He holds her there and, despite all his precise calculation, he is at a loss. It’s a rare sight, one to savour.

“Kiss me,” she urges him, eye to eye. “Like before.”

“You have not forgotten at all.”

“You’re a fool to think I had.”

He staunchly shakes his head. “I did not belie—”

Gaby lets the rest sound over her lips. _I did not believe you._ Yet she has caught him, fooled him regardless. He still holds her, close to the wall but not against it, and he still kisses back as if he’s memorised her; making good on the volley, the strategy he’s been mulling over since their first.

She had dreamt of this after the wine, his mouth back on her numb bruise now, applying another coat, refreshing her memory. There’s so little between them. The towelling, brushing pleasantly between her thighs, does little to soften the shape of him; the hard line of his sides and all the muscle in his shoulders, where her arms fold to clutch each wrist and lock him down.

“You are thinking too hard,” he mumbles, a shock over the curve of her jaw.

“What?”

“You are looking at the ceiling.”

“I must be bored.”

“Hmm.” Illya adjusts her in his grip then, raising her a little higher with a pleasant jolt. His fingertips curve to the inside of her thighs, under her skirt, high and close. He squints at the ceiling, brow furrowed. “You do not feel bored.”

“My _God_ , Illya,” she says, and masks her catching breath with a blow at her hair. “You do think highly of yourself.”

He smiles at her.

“And next?” Gaby presses. “I believe this is where you so cruelly dropped me.”

“I believe you went to bed.”

She hums then, as if musing on something only mildly interesting.

He wavers; to the wall, to the floor? She lets him dwell on it while she runs her nails up and down the back of his neck, tracing, bringing about a thrill of goosebumps. He shamelessly buries himself back into her neck then, which doesn’t clear her mind at all; doesn’t help her to stretch this on for as long as she can. He’s hungry, coming closer to the instinctive movement she wants from him, to have him unguarded in this state of in-between.

“Well, it _is_ late,” she allows then, quietly. She closes her trained legs around him, braces herself again at his neck, his shoulders. “You should go to bed.”

He smirks into her neck, lands another kiss there as if it were on her mouth, all spread lips and soothing tongue. She sneaks her fingers down the back of his robe, touches the stretch of hot skin at the top of his spine.

He does move then, spurred, peering over her shoulder to navigate the carpeted hallway she hasn’t yet been down.

“You are tired?” he asks her there, slowing a little. There’s a shyness in it, hushed like a whisper behind stage curtains, a sincerity between all the teasing and games.

She nods absently. She could stand to hear it again and again, that tone, long after tonight — hushed in her ear in all manner of moments, that instinctive check-in when it’s needed most. Just a gentle: _are you all right?_ At the tail end of long, desperate parties: _are you ready to go home?_ or simply, any time, anywhere:  _do you want me to come with you?_

She frowns over his shoulder for the clarity of it now, nosing beneath his ear as he walks her closer to his door. She has _never_ considered that before. Only minutes ago she'd considered spitefully taking him for a fling. But it’s a strong sensation, long-awaited. Just like having him at her back outside her flat; this capacity for the divvying up of burdens, of difficulty. He can take half the force of whatever is thrown at her next, and she for him, too. 

Solo is right: how soft she has become! _There is snow in your boots_ , her East Berlin neighbours would say, without fail, if ever a German was caught with a Russki, or even reading Pushkin. _Snow in my boots and all the rest_ , thinks Gaby, and she kisses him a little more greedily than before, because it tastes better when it’s stolen, forbidden. Better still to know that beneath it all he is warm and sweet.

Illya jolts her again with a slight _humph,_ balancing her there with only one hand at her back to open his door.

She doesn’t have chance to look around, couldn’t see for the dark if she did. He reaches the bed but doesn’t stop travelling, only kneels over the mattress with her, lowering, and she feels the whole weight of him settle on top, huge and missed, to cover her entirely.

Gaby raises a knee up his side to pull her shoe off. He must feel he’s helping her, rather than ruining her by the second, when he slips his palm blindly down her other thigh and all the way to her ankle, lays the other heel carefully on the floor. She lets hers clatter down beside it.

“Expensive,” Illya murmurs by her ear, and she laughs at him, shrinking into the hard, rebuking kiss he presses there.

She lets him brace his hand on her outer thigh, sighing when she hurriedly moves to the tie at his waist.

“Gaby," he says, hesitating to still her wrists. "You don’t have to.”

“I know. I just want these." It's only half a lie. She pushes the robe aside to smooth over the thick rounds of his shoulders.

Illya nods, nods, nods, and ducks back to her neck, his lips and heated breath pushing at the neckline of her top. It’s a shame to deprive him, already so far from soviet in all his eagerness. So she lets him help her with that too because he seems to enjoy that, the undressing of her, though she doesn’t need it one bit. She wriggles up and out of it, and he’s back on her chest, lazily now, taking his time. She cards through his hair and he groans under her touch, turning to rest his cheek on her chest, breathing.

“Everything alright?” she asks, softer than intended.

“ _Da._ ” He takes her waist in both hands, bracing on his elbows to shift lower down the mattress, to press a kiss into the dip below her brassiere.

She disguises her shock with a shift across the sheets, a barely-repressed wriggle. 

“Ok?”

“ _Ja_ ,” she says wryly, and his smirk warms over her skin.

“You mock me.” He smooths over her breasts, far less than a handful, but he dotes as carefully as he would over gold leaf, silk. “You are the one to gasp, to shiver like this.”

“Is that so laughable?”

“You said you did not have to be quiet.”

“Well,” she says lightly, and smiles, pacifying. “What do you expect me to say? Oh, _Illya_ , take me like I'm not rationed...”

He shrugs only one shoulder. She pushes it back down for him, presses her finger into the corner of his mouth to make him smile.

“Only what you want,” he says.

Gaby hums, and he shifts a little himself then, for how it rolls through her ribs and straight into his chest. How nice.

“Take that thing off,” she says grandly. “How about that?”

Even in the slim dark she spots his withering look, peering up at her with a total lack of surprise.

But finally he nods again, and she watches as he kneels up between her legs to untie the waist, shrug the robe all the way off his arms, dropping it on the floor with the shoes, her top. He’s wearing underwear, she notices woefully, and then with a little wavering relief. So she leans forward to hook into his waistband, pull him back to her.

“And these?” 

“I have guests.”

“Where usually you would walk about in the nude?”

He doesn’t answer that, only kneels up closer between her thighs, takes her calves in his hands. That’s something she’s never thought of, but she will again. Perhaps every night. Indefinitely.

She feels over his nightstand for the lamp, for its little switch. It sets the spotlight on the star of the show, glowing between her knees now in the softest amber hue, all angles and shadow. Good, he’s not just a dream, a ghost. He smiles. Better. She hopes he has been for a while. But most of all he’s whole and breathing, and all his body moves subtly with it, through the cut of his chest and all the scars and working muscles beneath, and lower.

Illya is staring at her similarly, lowers his broad hand between her legs to brush gently over her tight stomach, cup her waist. Seeing him in the light is incomparable, dizzying. It’s not Illya in the sun, but it’s close. Rare. Who else has seen him like this? Had they even come close to how taken she is now, silently wild, overwhelmed? Possessively she pulls his body back down to her, kisses him hard, parts him, tastes him, and Illya makes the lowest sound, a deep, crackling groan. He’s low between her thighs, rolling into her, unmistakably hard and—

She covers his mouth with her palm, only waking enough then to see what she’s done.

“You do that a lot,” he murmurs when he can, peeling back her fingers. “Why?”

“You talk too much.”

Half a smirk, for her very worst lie yet.

She covers him again, and he goes on under her fingers, “Or do you enjoy it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You like this.” Illya doubles the weight of her hand over his mouth, kisses into her palm. “The feeling.”

She can’t decide which eye to look into, choosing instead to admire the stretch of her fingers over him, of his over her. Her stomach drops, something low in her twitching, fluttering. He circles her wrist easily to bring her back.

“I like what you have to say. Sometimes.” She idles, just watching. “The feeling is not bad.”

“Not bad?” he mumbles. “How so?”

“Illya—”

He hums. He does it on purpose; has summoned all the heat from his body to push it into her sensitive fingers to prove his point.

“I want it on me.”

She’s glad she has turned on the light - though surely it betrays how still she has become - because there is a new, sharp focus in him, darting from her hand to her mouth to her body. She moves under him, tempting, and it works.

“Now?” he asks.

“You don’t have to.”

Illya laughs at that - or at least, he gives a huff of genuine amusement, which is truly close as it gets - before pressing a censuring kiss to the inside of her forearm. He does the same again when she laughs soon after; giddy for the sound of it on him, the quick flash of his teeth, the softening of his features.

He lowers, smiling sleepily now. He tests this newfound wisdom over her chest, the faint lace over her breasts, and soon learns that Russian draws the deepest sigh out of her, so he carries on that way.

Gaby hasn’t breathed in over an hour, surely, for how light headed she is when he reaches her ribs, mouthing over the shallow dip straight down the centre.

“Ok?” he asks again. He knows the answer.

She nods mindlessly, ruined already. But then Illya’s fingers reach under her arching back to unzip her skirt, and she has to engage her thighs to lift her hips, to slip it down them, and she finds then that they are shamefully weak. He steadies her, undoing his hard work soon after by pressing a hot kiss to the freed crease of her thigh.

She must say his name, because he stops.

“ _Da?_ ”

She touches his hair again, clean and soft, and presses his face closely into her. He makes the sweetest, lowest sound, cut off by a sharp, sudden hiss.

“Oh!” She finds an impossible strength to lean up, to see his fingers brushing over his bruised nose. “Sorry.”

“No,” Illya assures her, wrinkling his nose to shift the pain. She doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to seeing him down there, even with all the time in the world at their disposal. “It may be fractured.”

“Sorry,” she murmurs again. She brushes back his hair, tries to look. 

“You will be,” he promises with a quick flash of his eyes, and takes to her thighs again.

“An empty threat." She settles back down, unconcerned. "What is it Solo says? All bark, no bite.”

He ignores her, though she half-expects him to nip her with his teeth. Instead his mouth softens close and hot along the line of her hip, where she’d hidden his razor. He pushes along the band of her underwear, taps at her indicatively.

Perhaps not so empty. 

Gaby gentles him aside so she might lift up; let him roll the twist of cotton down her legs and cast it, less delicately now, to the floor.

He kisses her thigh, but he doesn’t rise from it. She can’t watch, can’t look away. He mouths something, tracing with only a brush of his lips, and she’s dying to know what it is, writhing there until he just _moves_ , only centimetres away now, lips and teeth and tongue and breath and heat — and then he does.

She’s not quiet. She'd promised she didn't have to be. Instead she lets herself sigh out anything she has in her, and so she can only _barely_ hold back from sharply grabbing his hair again, from pushing him closer with all this new freedom — but she doesn’t have to. 

He knows just when to cross his left arm over her stomach to hold her down. He laps and sucks over _just_ the right place, the right time, with glorious hot pressure. In just moments her writhing hips are threatening to buck up and break his nose in certainty. The weight of his forearm pushes down hard and she watches his fingertips turn white, pushing deep into her skin like four very necessary anchors, and his wrist watch going _tick tick tick_ without any certain consequence at all.

His free arm sneaks from around her thigh and down, flush between his hips and the mattress to curve around himself. He could finish her off with that sight, with just the change in his rhythm when he finds his own. He's not at all distracted. He’s spurred on, working harder between his wet, heated groans - for the taste of her, for his own touch, for the sounds he pulls from her - and she won’t last long, seeing his body tense and pry like that, muscle in him from top to bottom lengthening and shifting in the light and shadow, coupled with that _mouth.._. she could never have guessed he had it in him. Though, really, she should have; Illya never takes things by halves, never settles for a job half half done. The best. The best, fulfilling her greatest idea yet.

Most tormenting of all is the knowledge that she will have him like this again, and again, and again, if everything goes her way, and she absolutely refuses now to consider that it might not.

Illya braces her under his weight, firmer than ever, foreseeing something she can’t even fathom until he starts to draw it out of her. She’s dying to plant her feet to kick out, kick him, perhaps, but he drives her down into the mattress; to shield his nose, to give her the fullness of his skill without interruption - because he _enjoys_ it, keyed up and quickening, deepening, moaning himself now. The fiery sensitivity urges her to push him away, but the building heat in her core yearns to pull him back; to have him draw out the tightness balling up still inside her, as if his mouth could possibly soothe her though he is ruining her with it too.

Finally she can see for herself that only one Illya, no smoke or mirrors, is _wholly_ capable of doing both at once.

He breathes a single laugh at something she must have said, so she sticks her heel into the crease down his back.

“Illya,” she hisses, and he responds to that with a surprised groan, his hips grinding into the sheets for it. “Don’t mock me n-now — _fuck! Fuck fuck fuck fuck—_ ”

He's breaking too, loud and hot and crackling, and that’s it — she can’t hold her breath, just lets out one unrestrained whine, gripping the sheets and letting all the strength seep out of her. She’s sure, writhing under the iron belt of his arm, that she's whacked his nose again, but he goes on until her legs slacken and she pushes her hands to her eyes. Even then he soothes slowly, indulging himself.

(Likewise, his is a very soviet efficiency in all but his greed, his generosity; a quick, pin-point accuracy, bulls-eye, record-setting. How fun it will be to teach him the long game, when they both have the time.)

He kisses her there then, decisive and full, and she jumps for it.

“Come back,” she murmurs when she can, searching down her body for him with dancing, wriggling fingers.

“You’re tired,” Illya says, and she nods at the ceiling.

The mattress dips under his shifting weight. She nearly rolls him over with the little strength she has left, to grind down into his stomach and dull the flickering sensitivity between her legs; needing the pressure, needing nothing at all. Could she take him wholly now? On top, maybe. If she were on her back, and he lay on her from root to tip with all that radiating warmth, she’d never wake up.

But he comes up to lie flat on his back, only breathing beside her. That’s a sight in itself. In the light of the lamp, it is something she has never seen on him before. She is so used to his chest rising and falling like a controlled mechanism, uncommonly restrained, that this irregularity is endearing; makes the ache in her whole body swell to touch him.

She only claps her palm to his chest to pat him weakly on a job well done. He traps her hand there, where she feels his heart thumping away. He breathes steadily, lazily tastes what's left of her on his lips.

_God._

“I have never seen you so tired,” she manages.

“You are hard work.”

Yet he’s reclining as easily now as one might on a beach, legs out and head back, eyes closed. Basking, really, in the warm light of the lamp, in her company. She tries not to stare at the one thing separating the two scenarios, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination.

He is delightfully unconcerned, still pressing chastely to the back of her hand.

“What about you?” she asks.

“Hmm?” He thinks for a moment, smirking, and takes her palm from his chest to smother his mouth; “ _Hmm?_ ”

“You think you're funny.”

“No,” he muffles under her seriously, with only the most minute shake of his head. “Gathering intel.”

“Ha, ha.”

Illya’s eyes crinkle and she likes that so much she frees his lips, leans across to kiss them lazily, narrowly avoiding his nose.

He lets her soften her head on his arm, his second pillow long forgotten in the living room. It's a fine substitute. His soft heat is amplified by the clean sweat on his chest, the scattering of dark gold hair there.

She forces herself to wake a little, his own predicament not entirely forgotten. She’s certain he would never follow up on the case himself. 

"I suppose now you will fall soundly to sleep,” she says.

He glances wryly at her.

"Aren’t you so _tired?”_

“Gaby. I have.”

“You haven’t.” Less surprise, more indignation. She glances down his body again, scanning for herself over his briefs where he, by the looks of things, is truly not entirely finished.

She looks quizzically at him and, with no more than a long sigh through his nose, he lets her slip her hand tentatively down his chest, the flat of his stomach, over his underwear. The swallow in his throat is promising, encouraging, so she kisses it, and delights in the moan that falls out.

“I _have._ ”

“Shush.”

She palms over him. She does her best not to seem too pleasantly surprised but he sees it, the surveillance specialist, so when she looks back to him he only raises his brow, blinks warmly at her. He’s softening under her hand, having already come for himself. She feels that too, cooling and undeniable amidst all the banked heat.

“You _didn’t,”_ she says anyway.

“I would be this tired otherwise?”

“You just said I was hard work.” She rests her palm there heavily, tracing him. His eyes flicker. He is still too sensitive. She wonders how many times he has done this before. Or how few.

“You were hard work,” he manages, rolling up into the heat of her hand despite himself. She could watch him this way forever. “You were. You—” he stops himself with another swallow, a steadying hand around her back. “It was not fair fight.”

Gaby smiles at him. The ridiculous size of his whole body, all sprawled out and spent for her, and she has barely touched him. To think, she could blow a kiss at him and have him fall on the floor.

She gently brushes over his stomach instead, reaches back to unclasp her brassiere and drop it over the bed. Fully bare now, a surrender. He is entirely aware of it.

“You won’t want to wear those for long,” she tells him, and wriggles under the covers. “Come in. Intrude.”

Illya watches. “And what trick is this?”

“No _trick_ ,” she says sweetly, and pulls his lone pillow under her cheek. "Nothing _decadent_." He peers down at her fondly, so she ducks a little further in, hiding. “Just evening the fight. And really, it is very late.”

Illya can't deny that. A man of fact, he deigns finally to move, and it’s a good thing he does; if he had only let her rest on the too-hard mattress without frightening her a little, without thrilling her to stay awake to see what he’d do next, she’d be out like a light for three days herself.

So he takes them off, and he folds into the bed too. She budges in close, lets him share the pillow, takes his soft kiss willingly. Mostly, she leans her head on his open arm, lets his skin sink heat into hers, soft over miles of muscle and lean shape, so much of him just breathing and moving, so heavy, so  _big_ that she can’t comprehend how he fits in the bed without slipping in diagonally. Then he reaches over her, this stretch so close she can only widen her eyes, to turn off the beside lamp, plunge them into their familiar dark.

Gaby idly traces down his side to his hip and yes, she confirms with great triumph, the Red Peril is still there, and he is as naked as the day he was born. Noble and moral; Solo was right. Illya closes his eyes and lets a German share his bed. If her neighbours could see her now... If his handler, his comrades...

She spreads a generous hand over his shoulder to pull herself closer, chest to chest, and lets him push his thigh sleepily between hers.

“In the morning,” he relents, in his lowest, deepest grumble, and she tightens around him in reward. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ( ͡ ° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
> 
> Alas, yes!! more will be explained in the morning, of course, with a telephone call to Waverly. Because this is the most important aspect of this chapter.Yes. The Plot. Integral. So very vital. So............................... definitely at forefront of my mind at all times.
> 
> If anything is ever published under my name without detailing at least 5k of Illya giving head I need for you to call the police.


	6. Chapter 6

When she wakes, Illya is striped. The slatted blinds are half turned, filtering the rising sun into the room and bouncing it off the egg-shell walls. That’s how she wakes so early, with this stream of light denying her any ignorance of what she’s gotten herself tangled up in. Or, rather, with whom she has become tangled.

Illya is stubbornly immune to the yellow beams in his sleep. He’s on his back, his arm bent comically over his head, his elbow like the point of a dunce’s cap. The covers have been brushed all the way down to just beneath his navel, and that’s just a blessing. Because he’s covered in a dulled prismatic sheen of sleep-sweat, for all the heat stuffed into this closed room with two to a bed, body heat relentless and sinking in still.

So, feeling like a rude old gentleman, Gaby only ogles for a while because she deserves to. (In Siberia, she imagines, he’d sleep in furs from head to toe. But she forces herself not to think of that.)

Here he is gold and cream, peppered with little flecks and seams; tissue, stretching to bridge the skin he fights to burst out of, and which has been torn into time and time again. He’s not fighting now. He’s at rest, off duty, finally, and in all his bodily exhaustion he seems to sleep deeply enough not to scowl, not to glower through the back of his eyelids.

But it’s not gone. No. It would be deluded to assume she’d… _fixed_ him. She only wants to supply him with the opportunity, if he’ll take it, to rest easy. To switch off; disconnect the current and let him recuperate, cool down, repair, perhaps get a little lost without fear of being barked awake.

Because Gaby is, above all, a mechanic, and mechanics have a vested interest in meeting the very worst and making sense of it; easing it, gutting out the bad and refitting the rusted with the chrome, breathing life back into the exhausted. All with a personal sense of duty, of obligation; the results alone are a satisfying reward for this brand of work. _Good_ work. Worthwhile, excavating rot and corrosion. She’d once taken to a chassis and grabbed from it a sodden clod of browned metal, right into her hand, like half-baked bread, and slopped it into a bucket. She’d cursed, patted the vehicle’s worn rubber treads with an oil-blackened hand. Poorly cared for, neglected, pushed to its limit before finding her. So she’d ordered and installed a perfect girder of solid steel to put it back on its feet, running again, a perfect beast of an engine whirring away under her knowledge, her well-worn hands. For years she did this work, and every morning she’d have to hand back the keys she’d feel raw guilt gnawing at her, for dooming the car to its fate again and again and again just by letting it go.

Illya is not a thing to be fixed, but witnessing him make his own small repairs comes close to encouraging that same, satisfying glow in her chest. Good work, worthwhile, being there while he threatens to blooms again, almost forgetting and getting lost in the process. If this nudity and soft distraction provides him that escape, she will not complain. Not one bit. He would not be the only beneficiary of such an arrangement. She will take him as a regular, know his usual, have a photograph of him above her work bench and in her purse; special privileges, for all the sceptical passers-by to size themselves up to, quiz her on his provenance.

The notion of having a photograph of him proves this all a distant, impossible dream.

For now this is enough. ‘For now’ is all she can afford. The weight and heat beside her, his arm under her head, his loose fist on the mattress. It’s enough. His soft brow, soft mouth - good. His thigh loosely linked with hers - better still, perhaps the best of all. That he is still here and, with a furtive glance under the covers, lazy and sprawled and open. Well.

“Stop staring.” His voice crackles, heavily accented. “Make your telephone call.”

“Stop pretending to be asleep. It’s very unlike you to waste time.”

“I wake when I must.” Gravelly,  a little indignant — this, coupled with the new scrunch of his face for the light streaming in? She has struck gold.

Without opening his eyes he reaches over her, picks up his watch from his nightstand. He does squint then, delightfully crinkled in the sun, and huffs.

“Well?”

“Six fifty.” He slips his arm gently from under her head to cover his face.

“And yet you seem so well rested.”

Illya grumbles, and she secures his watch with sleep-weakened fingers. Then he takes to her waist easily, heavily — and he balks. Had he forgotten? She’s as bare as an open hand, warming now under his. And then he’s patently nude too, and he is positively boyish, a reddening propriety flooding the tips of his ears, through his pressed lips - something she’s missed on him. It’s better in daylight. His trapped thigh tenses.

“Something the matter?”

He shakes his head, grips her tighter, splaying gratefully over the slight curve of her hip. “No _trick_ ,” he echoes sardonically, his accent atrocious. “Last time I trust British spy.”

“First a German, then the British?” she tuts, edges closer. His thigh shifts very consciously between hers. “Next you’ll be chasing Americans.”

“You—” he gives her his hardest glare, stops himself. “Make your telephone call.”

Gaby smirks, presses her lips to the warm curve of his neck instead. There he still smells of his soap, his shower, his clean sweat from last night’s effort. She hums, and he responds with the rise of his thigh to meet her, have her roll down over him a little.

“You never rest,” he murmurs.

“I’m hard work.”

She grinds against him, stopping to settle at his hip. He groans deep. She feels it travel up his throat.

“You’re very different in the morning,” she tells him.

“You are not,” he draws her closer, bravely pulls her thigh over him. He smooths his palm down her back, settling at the curve. “You are like rusalki. Morning, noon, night.”

“What’s that?”

“Singing creatures. Beautiful women in the water.”

“Wrong. I can’t sing at all.”

“They dance,” he assures her gravely. “Rusalki change, to suit the good men passing by. Play to their weaknesses. Trick them.” He looks at her accusingly, moves her hand to his bare stomach where he’s firm and warm and welcoming. “Seduce them. Eat them.”

“And you think I have changed to please _you_?”

“No.” He’s resolute. “This is why you are threat. You have caught me anyway.”

Gaby likes this game. “Interesting. In this legend, you are a good man.”

Illya hums tiredly.

“And there are male rusalki, too.”

“No.”

“ _Very_ interesting,” she begins, but he is still smoothing down her back and lower, tracing the round of her behind, taking his time. She curls her calf around his side to pull him even closer, and he circles her ankle, presses it into his hip. “You Russians are afraid of women.”

“Some,” he confesses, more than keen to stop talking.

She pushes her hand low on his stomach again, and he frowns strangely for it, lips parting to make a pleasant, half-reluctant noise.

“You frighten me,” she says.

His lashes part. Very translucent, very blue. “No.” He shakes his head. “You are not afraid. Not anymore.”

She shrugs and traces his hip, the oblique dip leading down. He moves with her. “I would never expect you to pick up a work of fiction. Anything more than handbooks, guides to your little machines.”

“Tales read to me as a child. Once, to all of Russia’s children.” He searches over her for a moment, calculating every fraction, before turning back to the ceiling. “Naturally, such stories were not party-approved. Children read history, science. Not rusalki, magic. Old Russian lore was backwards, _uncivilised_ , so there was reform. Mother told me the rest. At night. A secret.”

Gaby stops trailing, pulls carefully back to look up at him. He hesitates a glance at her. It had not been an easy thing for him to say.

So even the poster child has had his doubts. Illya is open. She hopes she is more than an ear to him, now; hopes he had only wanted to tell her. But for all his confession, now he is uncomfortable.

“I should call Waverly,” she says gently. He nods, looking, as she had anticipated, relieved.

He slips her thigh from his stomach and leans over — his chest radiating a deep warmth, invitingly familiar and altogether brand new — to rifle through the nightstand. Gaby roves over the stretch of him, just feeling. She leans up and presses a kiss straight to his centre. His jaw tightens and his lips purse to focus on the task at hand.

“What are you doing?” she asks, redundantly.

“Telephone.” The sound travels through his chest and into her fingers, a reverberation she chases. She should really think up a hundred questions to ask while he’s there; still lingering, looming over her, still tinkering single-handedly with the bedside phone.

“How does the insulator work?” Yes, Illya would take a decade to explain that to her, and she’d feel every word in his chest, up his throat, over his lips. Suddenly the phone call is almost forgotten.

Almost. She still feels a grim and nervous tick in her chest for the weight of it, the possible brilliance - or disaster - it could lend to the rest of her day. But hoping for the best is an invitation to have it snatched from her. Low expectation, no expectation at all — that’s how to deal with imminent disappointment. Gaby has learnt that herself already; two families down and a whole life left behind.

But for that she’s determined to work harder, to secure what she’s picked up along the way; Solo and Illya, potential partners, potential constants. There have been set-backs, certainly, since she’d first hatched her plan — within moments since uttering it aloud she’d been jinxed; some sort of karmic retribution for just how much she _wants_ this, how greedy she is for it, to have her partners all to herself and not have to share anymore. A bad East German girl; an entitled one. She has wanted so badly and so openly that of _course_ her wish has been pinned to the KGB’s dartboard, readied to be pierced and stripped to ribbons. She has expected too much, and now it is her job to expect too little; only hope that the fates will have a little mercy, pleasantly surprise her with a shred of good fortune.

It’s incredibly difficult to consider her grand plan at all while Illya, a fatal distraction from the minute he’d materialised, still breathes his huffs of frustration over the top of her head. He’s almost wholly between her legs, so thoughtlessly naked he could be in a painting; draped in his crisp white sheets and looking, well, the way that he does. Something very blond and sculpted and reverent and, really, if she’d just hook her calf around his lower back she could absolutely compromise him, wrestle him into her like one of his forbidden night-time rusalki, devour him a little.

“You are stalling,” Illya says, to a question she’d long since forgotten.

He leans higher up on his elbow to take a closer look at what he’s grappling with, and she’s graced with the wonderful sight of his working arm; trying to twist something, connect something one-handed. She wouldn’t be surprised if he’s crafting a Fabergé egg over there; with all the skill he has in two hands she can’t imagine he’d be compromised with only one.

“It isolates signal,” he relents. “Fills up recording device with static. I will install one for you, in your home. I will show you.”

Gaby hums, considering indulgently that, perhaps, he has confessed more than he’d intended by promising her something like that. “You know, Illya, you would be better off using two hands.”

“I do not need two hands.”

“ _Interesting_.” His extraneous arm lies in the swathe of her hair over the pillows, his weight supported on his elbow. She rolls her head to quickly nip his knuckle with her teeth and he hums at her.

“Now,” he says lowly, too soon. He returns to the mattress and stretches his worked fingers. “Tell me where we are going.”

“We?”

“Call.”

Gaby peers over her shoulder at the distressingly utilitarian phone on the nightstand, its spiral cord flanked by something stout and silver on one end. She takes a final, lingering look at his face and all the rest, and with an indignant huff she rolls over, picks up the handset, and dials for HQ.

It rings, and rings, and she gives her badge number to the attendant at U.N.C.L.E.’s switchboard. She waits for Waverly to accept the call, totally unprepared to have a serious conversation because, behind, Illya scoots up to closely form around her. He tucks his thigh back in between hers and braces up again, head close to the receiver to listen with her. He expects her to talk to her superior like this? They may as well be sprawled on Waverly’s desk, for how the heat at her back makes her senseless, mortified, when the man himself answers.

“ _Agent Teller. Rather an early start for you, isn_ _’t it?_ ”

Illya’s hand curls around her hip to pull her back, to listen more intently. She slaps his hand away, close to an early grave.

“Good morning, Waverly,” she manages. She traps Illya’s thigh very tightly, locked there to still him from whatever he plans next. “Solo told me to call. You have good news.”

“ _I do indeed._ _”_

“Well?”

 _“Put Kuryakin on the phone, Miss Teller, if you would._ ”

“Illya?” She tightens her jaw. “ He’s—”

“ _Agent Solo checked in to confirm your location, with your whereabouts a particular priority after last night_ _’s disturbance.”_ He pauses weightily, another rebuke for her negligence. _“Don’t add to my morning’s grievances by thinking me a fool, Gaby._ ”

“He’s in the living room.”

“ _Kuryakin, take the phone from Miss Teller_ _’s hand, if you must. Consider this a warning dismissed if you do as you’re told_.”

“Now, hold on, Waverly, you can’t—”

“ _Don_ _’t compromise your fine track record, Agent. Do as you’re told._ ”

Illya tries to slip the handset from her, eventually having to pry it from her white-knuckled death grip. He waits a few moments more before answering, to feebly suggest some distance between them.

Gaby rolls furiously to face him, amplifying the tell-tale shift of sheets as closely as she can to the receiver. Certainly, Illya would be disciplined for this 'arrangement' more than she ever would, and that’s an ancient and traditionalist standpoint of Waverly’s she plans to exploit. More to aggravate Waverly than to get Illya into trouble... Though certainly, their sudden teamwork puts them both in equal stead for vengeance.

Illya covers the phone with his palm, glaring madly at her.

Then they speak in deliberately colloquial, rapid Russian. Of course. She doesn’t know anywhere near enough yet to decipher it, with the exception of _stop_ , _sorry, thank you,_ and, of course, Illya’s frequent _da_ ’s and _nyet_ ’s _._ His voice shrinks steadily lower, gruffer, followed by some rarer monologues of his own.

Illya pointedly avoids her eye, so she shifts the covers down her body and touches his chest, draws him to look at her. That only sends his baleful eyes to the ceiling in another display of his changeable soviet self-control.

“Of course,” he says finally, and Illya does look to her then, measuring her expression. “Eight o’clock.” Gaby tries to take back the phone. He shushes her with a finger to his own lips, then stills her fierce claw of a hand in his own, as steady as a rock. The sheets shift noisily again and Illya flashes his eyes at her. “Of course. Yes. No. Of course.”

Gaby rolls over him to push her ear to the receiver and listen, anticipating English now. Illya’s warning glare widens, overwhelmed, and his shushing hand wavers for where and how best to push her away. Eventually he only rolls his eyes and lets her lie there, stretching over the top of him just as he had her, a strange brand of torture, and she listens.

Fruitlessly.

“— _this further when you arrive. Do_ not _be late. I will telephone Solo with the appropriate instructions._ _”_

“Yes, sir,” Illya says. “Goodbye.” And then he rolls her over with his full weight, an easy flip, to pin her to the mattress. He absently puts the phone back on the hook, pushes her hair out of her face.

“Boy’s club,” Gaby mutters under him, thumps his chest. “ _Oh, Gaby. Call HQ, call Waverly and have him tell us what to do._ Huh! I am no more than a switchboard.”

“You,” he kisses her hard, “are impossible to please.”

She turns her head from him. “What did he say?”

“HQ, 0800.”

“I gathered _that_.” Gaby glares at the sun-striped window. “And I suppose when we arrive we will take the train to the post office? Perhaps there we will find a letter with coordinates to buried treasure, where our good news will lie in a puzzle of a thousand pieces.”

“You cannot wait one more hour?”

Her scowl fades. “I’ve been waiting for months.”

He smiles at her.

“What do you have?” Gaby presses. She splays over his chest, curls her fingers to touch him only with her knuckles. She does not want to take in too much of him. “Give it to me. How can you smile like this?”

“How could I not?” he moves over her and all that foreign weight and shape becomes familiar again. “I have waited all year for such news. Today is the day.”

“Good news? It _sounded_ like he was disciplining you.”

“He was.”

“For what?”

“This,” Illya says, and he looks at her as if she’d missed a turn in the road.

“Oh.”

“Oh,” he echoes, and he draws his palm from her hip to her waist, holds her there. “So, you cannot wait one more hour?”

“Oh, no.” She lets out a single, dizzied laugh. How does he do it? He almost takes it out of her, this very real anger bubbling furiously in the pit of her belly. It’s only upstaged now by all the girlish nerves everywhere else. She has touched him in the public eye for cover and, in shameful truth, fairly opportunely while a little drunk. But this isn’t a frivolous teasing to push him, to see how much he’d take before hissing _this is inappropriate._ This is more. This is frightening.

But there he is, looking very pleased with himself while she melts in the wake of his suggestion; both hazy, both evidently turned on.

“No?”

Gaby says nothing. He hovers over her lips, mere millimetres apart, until she must raise her head from the pillow to seal the gap herself. She feels very young. _You have done this before_ she tries, pressing a more forceful kiss to his lips to convince herself.  She concentrates on trying not to react too keenly to the gentle hand by her neck, rolling a lock of her hair between his thumb and forefinger. _Where did he learn that?_

“I can wait one hour,” she says evenly. “We can sit in the living room, if you’d like. I’d like to read the newspaper.”

Illya flattens a threat of a smile. “You would like to read the newspaper.”

“You may join me. I’m sure you have some Russian literature to start the day. Six hundred pages of misery, as your people enjoy.”

“You invite me to sit in my own living room.” He is entirely still. Gaby tries very hard not to wriggle underneath him, make him press back into her again. It is a dangerous game, to toy with him like this. Illya can take these games literally, or he can astutely play along; show her that wit she loves to see crawl out of the woodwork when he’s certain he won’t be considered a joke himself. With him leaning over her, weakening and failing dismally to hide it, she likes her odds.

“After your disciplinary this very morning, is it not sensible to behave well?” she asks sweetly.

“Yes. I would rather not.” There it is, that plush press over her hips again, followed by a contradictory and chaste kiss to her cheek. “We are off duty for one hour.”

“What will you do with that?”

“Once, twice.” Illya shrugs. He catches himself then, looks her in the eye very warmly. That makes her shrink, her heart on a spring in her chest. “If you want.”

“Twice?” She clears her throat, disguises it with a laugh. “You’re not so young anymore.”

Illya’s hands loop behind her back to press up into the curve. He’s languorous, his mouth lazy and warm over her bare shoulders, her neck. She feels his humour in him; in how his mouth curves mid-kiss for remembering something, something thought funny in hindsight. He pushes her loose hair aside to kiss her jaw, her cheek. She is careful of his nose, tilting aside and gentling for him to reach where he wants to go, but the point still clumsily pushes into her when he grows too eager, and he growls in frustration.

“Sorry,” she says, for the thousandth time. She pulls back, not daring to touch but hovering around it with her fingertips nonetheless. “For that.”

“It was deserved.”

“It was an _accident_.”

“You told me not to kiss you.”

“I wanted you to,” she offers quietly, the room already so full of secrets. “Just not then.”

Illya nods. “I know.”

She cards through his blond hair, lighter when left untamed, to tidy it for him. He shifts a knot out of his shoulders and sweeps his hand down her side, still kissing, hips rolling a little though she isn’t certain he means to. Instinctive, unthinking… How lucky she is to see the most rigid man in the world grow lazy with heat, his breath ghosting her shoulder in powerless huffs just for the feel of her underneath him. He had been formally rebuked only minutes ago, and here he is, despite all his noble intentions, with discipline still ringing in his ear. To be so wanted; such an indulgence for this soviet icon. Like this, she has dissolved all of Russia.

He is noticeably hard against her thigh. She rests her chin over his shoulder to breathe there for a moment, considering silently what she might do with all of that.

Illya kisses softly under her ear, tries to bring her back.

“Waverly forbids this,” she says, and her voice sounds odd on her.

“He thanked me for bringing you here.”

“Not for this, though.”

“No.”

“Are you breaking the rules, Illya?” She feigns sufficient outrage to make him tighten his jaw. But she is a bowl of nerves; can’t wholly get lost in him without knowing,  _knowing_ _…_

Illya shakes his head. “I was not given _rules_.”

“Protocol, then.”

“If I am?” he says artfully, pulling back to look her in the eye. “You are not accomplice?”

“Tell me what Waverly said just now.”

“I have told you everything I know.”

“Liar. I will go to HQ to hear the rest.”

“Gaby.”

“Illya.” She brushes up his arm, then abruptly lets her hand fall back to the mattress. “I like working with you.”

“I like to work with you also.”

“And I enjoy this.”

“So do I.”

“So. You understand.”

He pauses, shakes his head. “No.”

Gaby blows at her hair. “Right, well, there you have it.” She pushes against his chest. “Up you get.”

“What are you talking about?”

A wariness spreads over him the longer she’s quiet, and soon he’s frowning, and his stomach is a little tenser over hers, and he almost threatens to roll off her.

She turns her push into a grab, stilling him firmly at his ribs.

“Surveillance specialist,” she says laboriously. “ _Intelligence_ analyst. Still, you make me say this.”

He waits, a picture of confusion.

“Alright. Well. It is like with cars,” Gaby tries, spiralling in agony. If he were any closer - if that were even possible - he’d hear her pulse hammering, and the resentful sigh forming in her lungs. “How perhaps you have driven cars you have hated or have crashed or — well, not me. I have never crashed by _accident,_ but it can happen… So, you find this new car—” she measures him. His brow is steadily furrowing, but he stares at her still, and she can’t handle that intensity and think at the same time. So she looks at his collar bone instead. “— and this new car is nice and so on, so you want it, but you worry it will be stolen or it will cost you a lot to repair. Because you have had many cars, and have had them taken away or they have failed their tests or, well, you know. Then, what do you do when you find this new car and have nowhere to put it? It is more desirable, and more people will try to steal it, of course, so how do you get used to having it around without worrying? How do you trust yourself to look after it, make room for it? How do you drive another car afterwards? And then...”

He’s listening. “Go on.”

“No.”

“I have _never_ heard you talk like this.” He tuts, smiling faintly. “Very amusing.”

“Don’t.”

“You say Cowboy speaks in riddles.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter now.”

Illya rolls his eyes. “Gaby…”

“Burn the tape from your living room phone. From last night.”

He sobers immediately. “You think I would listen?”

“Just get rid of it.”

He hesitates, nods shallowly.

Gaby holds back from touching his face, his neck. All of him. She thinks for a moment that Solo would have the right words for this, but he wouldn’t. Like him, she is at a loss for whatever _this_ is. She only wavers, inches away and breathing it all in but knowing very well it will do her no good.

“I do not have much here to eat,” he admits then, an unforgivable failing. “We can stop somewhere for breakfast, if you’d like?”

“You don’t want to know what I said on the phone?”

“No.”

“You said you would never again trust a British spy.”

“My own fault,” he says. “I have already let you in.”

“A rookie mistake. Trust like that will get you killed.”

“You think I am double agent. I think you are rusalka,” he shrugs at her withering look. “We have no trust left now. Like your cars, stolen.”

“I would like, very much—” and she does touch him now, a palm around the back of his neck, “—if you would forget everything I have said to you within the past five minutes.”

“I am not tape. You cannot expect me to _forget_ such a monumental speech.”

“Shut up.”

Illya smiles as if he has won, and he parts her lips under his. She feels his warm sigh before she hears it, and she softens her resentful grip on him. Absolutely, an hour is enough, and the broad palm he trails to brush over her breasts is enough to debilitate her for another after that, too. And his tongue, his teeth... She smooths down the whole stretch of his back, tracing soft skin over hard muscle, and all the raises and wounds and rivulets in-between. Then it’s his turn to let out a heated moan; to press his forehead to hers and breathe, slow down.

“I like to work with you,” he murmurs, and he pulls her hand back to his neck. His whole body looms over her. Still so much. Too much. “I understand.”

“Right,” she breathes. “Well.”

“You will need change of clothes before HQ.”

“ _Mein Gott_ , Illya,” Gaby manages. “Do not make me think of clothes.”

“You have expected _me_ to think all morning.”

“Then don’t.” She takes him back greedily. “Stop thinking.”

“I have not thought in days.”

“Good.”

“But to change clothes, to eat, to…” he suddenly focuses his entire attention on the window across the room. “We will be very late.”

“Well, you’ll just have to work extra hard, won’t you?”

Illya’s smile piques, but he looks down. “I do not want to sneak around with you.”

“Oh.”

“No, not—” he holds up a finger, carefully chooses his words.

“Look at yourself, Illya.”

“This... That is not important." She watches the blush crawl up his neck, live and red and real. He kisses her forehead quickly and that makes it all the worse, as he climbs carefully over her and out of his bed. She watches him pick up his discarded robe and cross his bedroom, still as unconcernedly nude as if he's in a bath house. And what a sight it is; this man, who had once nearly died for touching her bare thigh, gingerly stepping around her discarded shoes and undergarments now to dress himself in front of her. What great idea pulled this all to fruition for Gaby Teller? Her greatest idea yet, she thinks: all her own, and she had won it fair and square.

“You can’t say I have _tricked_ you.”

“No,” he says. “No. But you understand.”

“I don’t.” She kicks the sheets down to the end of the bed, lounges back. “Go on.”

Illya’s lips purse, and he is truly struggling. It's very gratifying to be _seen_ by him, baffle him a little. He opens his wardrobe, reluctantly turning his gaze away.

“You aren’t worried about my _virtue,_ are you?”

With even greater difficulty: “Of course not.”

“Good.” She rolls onto her front, drops her face into his pillow. “Because I don’t have any.”

Illya’s palm soon enough comes back to rest between her shoulders. “Get dressed. If we are late, we will not work together again.”

“That’s dramatic,” she mumbles into the cotton.

“It is Waverly’s order.”

She rolls back over but his hand stays, drifting over her ribs, settling again at the crux of her chest. He’s already in his trousers, perching on the edge of his mattress and putting her to shame for all her laziness.

“So you _do_ know more than you’ve told me,” she challenges.

“Only this much.”

“Well. I suppose, for the sake of international relations…” Gaby loops around his neck, pulls him all the way down, where she softens a little for his nose. “We should be on our best behaviour.”

“Gaby.”

“Just one.”

He huffs, kisses her.

“What’s _two_ in Russian?”

“You know this.”

“ _Dva_ ,” she says deftly, and Illya softens begrudgingly into another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **me:** [promises to resolve the 'plot' in the 'morning']  
>  **also me:** [5k of pillow talk] uh
> 
> but honestly truly this got so out of hand omg... but I will be back! Today, most likely! To post the FINAL chapter (I promise). With resolution! And hastily crammed exposition to justify my waxing lyrical about these two idiots for 30k! Hopefullly!
> 
> Thank you so so much for sticking around, and for all of your wonderful comments! I look forward to them all the time. I hope this chapter and the next almost makes up for the ridiculous delay in posting (it's been a strange week... writing confidence has taken a little nosedive along with everything else, but I'm back on track now, and I can't wait to resolve this fic and get back to writing even more indulgent garbage in the near future) xxxxxxx


	7. Chapter 7

Gaby has three unread letters on her desk. None, however, hold the coordinates to buried treasure, so still she is both completely uninterested and entirely in the dark.

Her co-workers smile at her, greet her on her return from Holland. Did she buy wooden clogs, did she see the tulips? No, she says, but she brought back biscuits. She doesn’t tell them that the cities blend eventually, how an itinerary taints unfamiliar roads and architecture and languages as an obstacle more than a treat. _Sounds like you need a holiday_ , they'd say anyway, and it’s true; she is well over-due. But today really isn’t the time to push that point.

Her living room carpet had already been ripped up when she’d returned for a change of clothes. The bare floorboards had creaked just like those in Amsterdam, only here there was a stain in the wood grain where the bodies had been. Removals hadn’t completely finished the job — plastic still covered her furniture, and all of her cushions and throws and curtains had been taken away to be laundered. The room, empty and echoing like that, had all been just another suitcase-by-the-door; she is still freshly certain of how all she has is impermanent, indefinite. So this much was not a surprise.

Solo rounds the corner, a streak of deep blue suit and neat dark hair, a sparkle from the far side of the room. The office is entirely used to him appearing at random, so very few turn to take him in. This seems to ruffle him, so he takes a long shamble through the maze of desks and chairs to grace every down-turned gaze, lure them back to him again, and by the time he reaches Gaby’s desk his confidence in his ability to disrupt the hard work of her peers is fully renewed. This is a singular permanence she has come to expect of him.

“So, did you give him hell?”

“Oh, be quiet.”

Napoleon perches on the edge of her desk, pushes a sheet of paper from under his thigh with a splay of all four fingertips. “Where is he?”

“Talking to Waverly,” Gaby says, terse. “We accounted for the attack last night.  _I_ have since been dismissed.”

“Boy’s club,” Solo chides, with a click of his tongue. “I’d never dismiss you, Gaby.”

“You would, and you have. Many times.”

“I imagine Peril’s being thoroughly interrogated,” he detracts, succinctly proving her point. He watches her closely, dripping with suggestion.

Gaby sips her coffee - very dark, for her _very_ unprofessional lack of sleep - and busies herself with straightening errant papers, fleeing paper clips. Her desk is a mess. It is always a mess. Too small, too level. After all this time she’s still accustomed to sprawling worktops and benches, not this polished, skinny thing.

“I’m sure he is,” she offers.

“On what, I wonder? His work at your apartment, or your work in his?”

“Have I not told you already to shut up? For a covert operative, you are a terrible listener.”

He brushes a scattering of Danish pastry flakes off her sleeve, beaming fondly. “Only once you tell me everything.”

“Not on your life.”

“Gaby. The fewer beans you spill, the more incriminating my estimation.”

“What are you here for, exactly? Hmm?” she raises her brow at him, tilts her chin. “To warm my desk?”

“That, and I have good news.”

“Will you give it to me now, or will I have to wait three to five working days?”

Solo smiles placidly. “I’m on probation. Sanders’ orders, with no small thanks to your frankly _obsessive_ investment in my employment. I’m yours, and U.N.C.L.E.’s, for another six luxurious months, on the condition that I remain on my very best behaviour.”

“So you’ll be back in New York by tomorrow.”

He flicks a paper clip into her lap, smiles wider.

“You’re staying,” Gaby says.

“That’s right.”

“Six months.”

“You’re on a roll, Fräulein. Don’t happen to have tomorrow’s lottery draw, do you?”

Gaby doesn’t know what else to do; how to get rid of this… unbridled _hum_ of victory — one down, one to go — so she pats his leg amiably. “As if you could not forge a humble lottery ticket yourself.”

“Hell, there’s no fun in that.”

“It’s all in the gamble,” she says.

“Exactly.”

Gaby tuts. “I am right. Again. Now, _you_ said I have pulled strings. Show them to me.  Tell me how I convinced the CIA to loosen your collar without speaking to them once.”

He adjusts his cuffs. “How _does_ Peril keep up with you?”

“He doesn’t. Tell me what you know.”

“Where’s the rush? We have six months.”

“Solo.” She suspends her coffee over his lap.

He frowns at her. “Come now, Gaby. You wouldn’t.”

“It has been a long week.” She tilts the mug a little, the steam rising.

“Mr Waverly will see you now.”

Napoleon flashes his most beatific grin at Waverly’s secretary, hovering now in the doorway opposite. Gaby glares beneath her lashes at Napoleon Solo, the man who dodges death like the devil himself.

Who’s pulling strings, now?

 

\---

 

“Good news. _Good news_. All I hear, and yet still I have nothing to show for it. How is that?”

Gaby glares down her nose at Waverly in that low, low chair of his — lower than all the rest in his office, as he virtually reclines while still managing to hold the attention of his audience of three. He doesn’t _need_ an elevated position. Intimidation has never been his forte. No, Waverly is all patience and good manners and investment, like at trainer of racehorses. Gaby has little choice but to button up, to wait, to have him deliver this Good News in his most plummy and convoluted way, or else she’ll never hear it at all.

Worse yet, he can pinpoint the exact moment she gathers this; and so then his greying brow raises, and the rest of his face remains absolutely passive, and his eyes follow her as she hesitates a palm along the edge of his desk.

Illya sits rather stiffly in the armchair behind her, left side, his hands braced on his knees.

Surrounded by the glass and the polished wood of Waverly’s office Illya could be another trinket; another crystal decanter or a spinning globe or a silver pen in Waverly’s drawer, for how still he is, how obediently placed. He also stares up beneath his brow at her, only this one burns. She doesn’t want to look at him. The fact he has not yet risen to beam at her or fled to pack his bags for Moscow gives away nothing of what has been discussed in her absence. But it does stoke the low, simmering tension in her gut. She wishes he’d at least say good morning; at least to _pretend_ they hadn’t been sprawled all over one another just an hour ago.

“Well?” she asks Waverly, her brow high.

“Miss Teller, I would appreciate that you do sit down. This meeting may be a long one.”

Gaby still hovers. He remains settled in his generous chair, his hands together, fingers splayed. A long and infuriatingly leisurely meeting, then. There’s that anger in her hands again, the hard set of her jaw. Only, now, there are no back alleys to swerve into, and no dark to hide in, and no orders to snap back at him. Waverly doesn’t work like that.

So she surrenders to sit in the remaining chair beside Illya. There, her leg bobs furiously on the hinge of her crossed knee.

Solo finally leans on his hip against the wing-back.

“Well, let’s hop straight to it, shall we?” says Waverly, dry as a bone. “I’m sure these contract reviews have been at the forefront of your minds all week. They have certainly taken up far more of my time than I had anticipated. No, no, Gaby, that’s not a _bad_ thing. Fortuitous, actually, the timing. Looking over all three of your files at Miss Teller’s demand has proven rather pivotal in procuring work for you all at such short notice. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had access to the myriad of resources I’d needed to strike a deal at the right time.”

“ _Deal_?” Gaby echoes, before she can stop herself. Solo, comfortably leaning behind her, seems to radiate enthusiasm.

“I had a convenient number of documents and figures to hand for use as leverage shortly after Oleg made his demand for Kuryakin’s extraction. You’re to be thanked for that, Gaby, for insisting that I secure both Solo and Kuryakin’s contracts so promptly. I was drafting my appeal when I received the call from Lubyanka, Moscow. It would have been dreadfully embarrassing to be caught unaware of our agent’s recent records; to not have anything to throw back on a whim, so to speak.”

“That is not so much an achievement as it is coincidence,” she says.

“Perhaps. But it was your commended work in Amsterdam, and your multiple unmarked displays of initiative over the past term, which lead to my seeking out work for you somewhere more pleasant, a small holiday somewhere warm, if you’ll recall. That’s where our real leverage comes to be of some use to us.

 “In perusing open work in sunnier climes for the three of you, we came across the KGB’s most pressing priority. A mission of high enough alert to require not only international aid from U.N.C.L.E., but the use of both Mr Solo _and_ Mr Kuryakin. Really, very fortunate timing.”

“ _And?_ ”

“Back to jingoistic warfare, I’m afraid. A fanatic, bent on sinking his remaining wealth and influence to push for another nuclear missile crisis in Cuba. Now—” and he stops Solo’s interjection dead with a single raise of his finger. “Now, the man _is_ an American, currently stationed with a cache of nuclear weapons aboard his fleet of unmarked ships in Lisbon, Portugal. He’s also a freshly staunch communist, determined to put himself up as a martyr for _Russia_. Russia, however, wants the man dead for trying to dig up buried bones, so to speak, and the CIA are determined to exterminate him for the very same reason. The US and the USSR settled their quarrels just two years prior, as… Well, I'm sure you all know. It would do neither power any good to have an unpredictable lone ranger barrelling in and reigniting that whole debacle beyond their control.”

“Where did he get the weapons?” Gaby asks. “You say he is American, but America wants him dead. So who has supplied him?”

“That’s what we’d like for you to find out,” Waverly replies, pointing his joined fingers at her. “By infiltrating his operation from within. He has a penchant for recruiting, so, Agent Solo, as an aspiring American defector, you will be his project; he’ll be turning you Red, if you like. Once his trust is acquired, you’ll kindly pilfer any documentation with regards to his attack strategy, and obtain intel on his suppliers.”

“And me? What’s my cover?”

“As driver and surveillance, you require no cover. By day, Gaby, you are a lone tourist. Consider yourself on-call for the duration, as Kuryakin and Solo will be tracked appropriately for each meeting, so you ought to remain within their surrounded area for any unexpected extraction. You’ll find several marked maps of the city in your dossier to look over and memorise as best you can on the flight. ”

Illya moves for the very first time, holding up the manila folder tucked between his side and the chair. She takes it, eyeing him.

“And what about him?”

Waverly frowns. “ _Him_?”

“I am here,” Illya reminds her, low, almost embarrassed. She'd kill to know what he's told Waverly. What he's been asked. “You might speak to me.”

“What about _you?_ ” she reiterates. “You could be dead already, for how quiet you are.”

“As alluded to previously,” Waverly interjects, drawing back her scrupulous eye, “Your drawing attention to Kuryakin’s file provided me enough reference material to bargain with the KGB on demand. I was able to relay his work with us, and the results he has provided for them while working here, and they are satisfied. He is to remain with us until this mission is completed, and we will take it from there. I believe, Kuryakin, that you have already been offered the opportunity to accept another contract with us?”

Illya nods once.

Gaby stares at him, her chest shallow. “So? Until then, what do they want from you? Which limb will they take from you for…? What is it?” she looks to Solo.

“Collateral,” Napoleon provides.

“That.”

“I am to work here until they call me back,” Illya explains.

“And when will that be?”

“We are to be given a week’s notice,” Waverly says. “For now, that is the best we can do. Of course, we will keep pushing.”

Gaby nods for too long, stops bobbing her leg. “Well, good. Good.”

Waverly’s calculating stare between she and Illya is impossible to return, piercing over the severe fold of his knuckles, so she glances instead to Solo. His polite and knowing smile is bursting at the seams, which is infinitely worse.

But Illya meets her eye evenly. He seems as nervous as she is, trying to find familiarity by looking at her instead of taking in the whole, new room. She tries to stop roving over his features as if it will be the last time she’ll see them, but it is still habit. Indefinite is no comfort, and neither is a week’s notice at the drop of a hat. But it is wholly more promising than three days, and at least she will be prepared for that now; know when to begin slipping away, how to hold back from taking in too much in case she lose it too quickly. Stasis, really. Stasis, and maintaining what she has already gotten herself into. Her hurt hasn't been for nothing. Just preparation. Building a little immunity.

“I will be KGB diplomat,” Illya offers quietly, waking her a little. “The mark will use me to communicate his demands. Of course, I will be wired. When he is vulnerable, when we have intel, Solo and I will retire him.”

“And Novosibirsk?” Gaby pries, searching for the drain everything will inevitably seep through. She needs this watertight, exact — Illya, and Solo too, will always be indefinite, but she can’t build any confidence for a mission with half-certainties. “I imagine they expect more for their bargain than is fair. What else have we lost?”

Waverly gives a surprised smile. “Siberia is handled. We’re sending a Russian speaker of our own to fill the agent demand there, in exchange for Kuryakin’s work with us in Portugal. Agent Petrenko, our Ukrainian in level 2.”

Gaby nods again. “And when do we leave?”

“Three o’clock this afternoon.” He takes in their expressions. She imagines they make quite the varied hand. Illya’s grip tightens on his knee, but he keeps quiet. “As always, apologies for the late notice. I’ll arrange for a taxi to the airport.”

“No,” Gaby insists. “I’ll drive.”

 

\---

 

Gaby’s sunglasses lend the beach a sepia tone, so she slides them back up into her hair. The last thing she wants is for this scene to feel antique. Because Illya Kuryakin is sitting, of his own volition, in the sand, in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, and that is not something she intends to let slip into history.

Beside her, Solo has finished his long-winded and staggeringly poor attempt at Portuguese to order three gaily coloured drinks. Appropriately, three times too strong for two o’clock in the afternoon.

“We’re celebrating,” he drawls, tapping the sunglasses from her head to her nose.

“Your honeymoon?” asks the bartender, in very well-practised English, and Solo’s triumphant grin falters. Gaby’s only widens.

“Something like that.”

Leading the way back to their loungers, Gaby flicks the little orange umbrella. “Illya will not drink this.”

Up the sloping sandy hill and over the sun beaten tarmac, local police sirens finally catch up in their wake, streaming past in a line of white and blinding flashes of windscreens.

“No, but that colour goes very well with those shorts of his.”

“I thought they were yours.”

He gives her a curious little look, waits for the blaring sirens to pass. “You think Peril and I would share bathing suits? The man almost had me in a choke hold for suggesting we share the cot.”

“He didn’t mean it.”

“I have never seen such hunger for reaping another man's life.”

She ignores him. “Look at him, with his back to you now. He cares for you, trusts you.”

Illya glares over his shoulder at them, sensing his personal assassination. 

It’s impossible he could hear them, with the sirens still ringing away, further down the road now but no less late for arrival. The PIDE should dispatch the convoy elsewhere soon enough, and they’ll come shuffling quietly back the way they came, a little embarrassed for their eagerness. Perhaps then she could whisper more to Solo without Illya overhearing. Tell him finally everything she wants to spill to him; everything he wants to know.

“Shouldn’t you be lathering him in sunscreen by now? There’s a fine excuse.” Solo settles into his lounger, making her mind up never to confide in him again. “You can thank me later.”

“Oh, I’ll thank you later,” Gaby says, and she whips him sharply with the tail of her towel. She takes the second glass from his hand, where, as if expecting her attack, he’d managed naturally not to spill one drop. “Work on that tan, Mr Important Suit. I’ll do all the hard work. As usual.”

Solo smiles wistfully, sips his drink. “Russia’s second most dangerous martyr. A red bikini, too. How fitting.”

“It’s _cherry_ ,” Gaby hisses back at him, and she plods across the sand towards Russia himself.

The mission had only been active for four days. The unmarked ships are still being scoured in the harbour, crawling with those who know what to look for, how best to proceed. Gaby, clad in her modest wrap from her surveillance at the pier, had idled at the side of the road for an hour while their final step unfolded, listening in via the scanner in the car radio.

It had all been a little messier than expected — or, at least, messier than the dossier had insisted upon. With those two, it is universally considered best to give them a narrow berth to cause havoc within; a high bar for tolerance tends to encourage them to meet it, breach it, and out-do one another until they'd leave more of a mess than they came to clean up. It is smarter to insist on minimum disruption, so they might take more pleasure in breaking that low ball boundary in less detrimental proportions. 

Gaby had watched in her wing mirror as Illya and Solo clapped their shoes along the mosaic square, towards her little olive green car, motor running, and flung themselves inside. And away they went, the two of them absolving their red hands on beach towels as Gaby sped down the length of the seaside, end to end, to arrive at the opposite curl of Lisbon’s curving coast. She'd grinned so wildly, and neither of them teased her for it.

So their work is completed, their mark eliminated, and their extraction arrives in twelve hours — Gaby’s idea. She has a mission of her own to attend to; with the aid of Portugal’s heat, which bends even toughest of iron to her will.

“Does she have papers?” Gaby asks.

Illya squints up at her. “Who?”

“The sea. You stare very vengefully.” She adopts her finest impression: “ _You, saltwater. Your papers. Why blue? You should be red._ ”

Gaby hands him his flamboyant glass, drinks up his puzzlement. She feels Solo’s smirk in her back from one hundred metres up the beach.

“Not bad,” Illya rumbles, setting his glass in the shadow he casts in the sand, where no doubt it will soon boil over. She kneels to bury hers beside his, too. “You could say black, also. For the Black Sea.”

She nods charitably, standing back up. “Not bad.”

“The sirens?”

“Local police. Must have missed the precursor.”

He nods. Despite the treacherously coarse sand he’d complained of _all_ week, he had still taken his precious leather camera bag from the car. The camera itself rests now in his lap, where he’s reddening in the midday sun.

“Solo suggests that I apply your sunscreen.”

“Of course.”

“Really?”

“Of course he said that,” Illya finishes, and he looks up, smiling wryly at her. It's then that she spots the new sun-pink tinge to his cheekbones, his forehead. For that she does her best not to succumb to the little seed of affection glowing strongly in her chest, kiss him gently all over.

Gaby doesn’t move to provide shade for him. She likes that he must squint to look at her, through the sun and salted breeze. If they were alone, she wonders if he’d move her himself; a tap on the hip, or his calf nudging hers.

“You will get terrible tan lines in that shirt,” she tries.

He lifts up the white hem, shows her the hidden square of gauze on his ribs.

“What did you do?”

“Broke table.”

“ _Dummkopf_.”

Illya nods. He turns to dig up his drink so she plucks his camera from his lap, suspends it by its leather strap between her fingers.

“That is very expensive,” he says, making no quick effort to move.

"You won't fight me for it," she challenges indulgently, half hoping he will. "By the water, rusalki are at their most powerful."

"You have been reading."

"It was a long flight." 

Gaby peers through the viewfinder.

“Not at the sun,” he warns.

“But that was my only desire,” she protests dryly. She focuses on her own feet in the sand, then swings the lens up to Illya. “How do I take the photo?”

“ _You_ do not.”

She presses the shutter release.

“That film is very —”

“ _Expensive_.”

“Yes.”

“Add it to the tab.” Gaby steps back in case he should swipe at her knees. She takes another photograph, aiming deliberately this time, and he looks resolutely away. “Have you ever photographed me, Illya?”

“You think I would not ask you first?”

“It is always the quiet types,” she says gravely. “You, with your hats, and your jackets, and your _lurking_. It would not surprise me at all.”

“You think too little of me.”

“I think of you a lot.”

He smiles at the sand. “That is not what I meant.”

Another snap. “I want that one in print,” she says, dead serious. “Tell me, do they have dark rooms in Lubyanka? For _photography_ , of course.”

Illya pauses. He holds out his hand, beckons her closer. “Come.”

She reads him. One leg out, the other bent. Relaxed. Compromised. At rest. He is close to sleepy here, in the blinding sun, just as she has been craving for weeks. Only now it seems nothing but natural; if not a wonderfully domestic sight, then absolutely ordinary, routine. How long she’d spent staring at that godforsaken suitcase at his door! And how long she’d thought she would lose everything so quickly... Yet here he is, her Illya, with sand covering his thighs and dusting the underside of his forearms, where he’d leant back on his elbows with all the time in the world. Downright _normal_ , leisurely, uncomplicated. It’s what she’s wanted all along.

So she considers, with all the bland easiness of him there, that he is not too upset, and she wants to be touched by him like this.

“Come here, Gaby.”

With a cautionary glance at Solo, she does. She crosses the hot sand and, when she’s within arm’s reach, he accepts the camera from her. He diligently wraps the strap around, tucks it all back into its foil-lined bag.

“Well? You haven’t answered me. Do they?”

He gently folds his palm around the back of her knee, and he yanks her down flat into the sand.

“You—!”

“Answer is irrelevant,” Illya says calmly, pinning her with no more than a quick grunt. He pushes her haphazard sunglasses back up into her hair, stilling her. “I may not go back to Lubyanka.”

Gaby stares up at him, darting. “You can’t promise that.”

“I know this.”

“Then, what?”

“It does not take six months to develop film." He tucks her windswept hair behind her ear. "You will get your photograph. I will deliver it personally.”

“Good. And what then?”

Illya tilts his head at her, admonishing. “You know I cannot promise anything to you.”

She pushes at the brace of his arms with no real conviction.

“But I have thought on it,” he says. “You have persuaded me.”

“Really.”

“You, Cowboy.” Illya shrugs modestly. “This arrangement is not bad.”

“Not _bad_?”

“I like working with you. Both of you. I would like to work like this for a long time.”

“Don’t flirt.”

Illya smiles. Now she is certain the sun has affected him, won him over, because he’s blooming freely like an idiot now, and so her work is almost done.

She rolls her head to look back as far as she can, but it’s fruitless. “Will you make me wait six months, now?” she prompts, taking his jaw in her hand.

“For what?” he says warmly, knowing exactly what.

“Well, is he looking?”

Illya takes a furtive glance up the beach for her. “No. He is at the bar.”

So she leans up to kiss him in broad, burning daylight. And he tastes the same, sounds the same — _so he is one man_ , she confirms, finally, and she has seen the best and the worst of him. There’s no hidden seam at all. The whirlpool in her chest calms and rages just the same, whether in a darkened room or on a bright white beach; they might finally forget, drop the cover, push the schedule on and on and on, indefinitely.

And that’s enough, she thinks. For now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  Most important note:  
> Gaby _absolutely_ made Illya stand outside her car while he ate his breakfast pastry. Buttery crumbs? BUTTERY CRUMBS? An unforgivable attack.
> 
> Gaby gets her photograph! Illya is no longer entirely hanging on by a thread! Solo is refreshingly terrible at Portuguese! A happy ending for all, because I am garbage and I love them.
> 
> Thank you for reading! For getting this far! For sticking with it! For putting up with my strangely staggered updates! Cannot thank you all enough for being so sweet and generous, thank you thank you :) 
> 
>  
> 
>  


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